LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, 

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UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 




W. C. PRIME, LL.D. 

AUTHOR OF "ALONG NEW ENGLAND ROADS ' 
"l GO A-FISHING" ETC. 




2137* 



NEW YORK 

HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 

1895 



T5 zW\r 

J* At 



Copyright, 1895, by Harper & Brothers. 



All rights reserved. 



CONTENTS 



CHAPTER PAGE 

I. THE PRIMEVAL FOREST I 

II. A TROUT-STREAM 12 

III. AN UP-COUNTRY ARTIST 24 

IV. BEYOND 37 

V. AN OLD ANGLER 54 

VI. DOUGHNUTS AND TOBACCO 67 

VII. JOHN LEDYARD 77 

VIII. THURSDAY-EVENING MEETING .... 85 

IX. AN EASTER LONG AGO 92 

X. AN OLD-TIME CHRISTMAS 102 

XI. ALONE AT THANKSGIVING Ill 

XII. HOW THE OLD LADY BEAT JOHN . . . 122 

XIII. PHILISTIS 128 

XIV. A NORTHERN SLEIGH-RIDE I35 

XV. LIFE SEEN THROUGH A WINDOW . . . 148 

XVI. COLORED PEOPLE 1 56 

XVII. EXAMPLE 172 

XVIII. THE SIGN OF THE CROSS 180 

XIX. A CHILD'S VOICE .... , . . . 19I 

XX. PURITAN SUNDAY 201 



' 



AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 



THE PRIMEVAL FOREST 

Lonesome Lake cabin stands three thousand 
feet above the sea, in the primeval forest. It is 
reached by a zigzag bridle-path, cut in the moun- 
tain-side, which leads up from the Franconia Notch 
road. The cabin and lake are a thousand feet 
above the road. Both road and bridle-path go 
through the primeval forest. No axe of lumber- 
man has, hitherto, desecrated this forest sanctuary. 

The expression " primeval forest " is little under- 
stood by many who use it. While there is an 
almost universal desire to preserve portions of our 
American forests from the saw-mill, there seems to 
be everywhere a prevalent notion that this end can 
be accomplished by a judicious system of forestry, 
which includes the plan of thinning out the woods, 
selecting and cutting from year to year some of 



2 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

the older trees, guarding the younger to grow up 
and grow old, thus preserving and cherishing a 
perpetual succession of shadowy groves. Well 
meant though this plan doubtless is, and suited to 
preserving parks, it would, if carried out, be destruc- 
tive to the primeval forest, whose grandeur in things 
large and beauty in things small can only be pre- 
served as they have been created, by letting alone. 
The forest can take care of itself, but is jealous of 
interference. It is not a park, nor does it resemble 
a park. The one is mere nature, the other is art. 
The natural forest is a world of innumerable creat- 
ures, animate and inanimate, who have from time 
immemorial lived in community. You can never 
tame the wildness of those people. 

Why not call trees people ? — since, if you come to 
live among them year after year, you will learn to 
know many of them personally, and an attachment 
will grow up between you and them individually. 
They will be companionable to you, as are your 
horses and your dogs, and after a while you will 
have the same sympathy with them that you have 
with the next higher order of living beings whom 
you call animals. 

There are hundreds of white-birch trees on the 
mountain-side, and on the ridge, and around the lake, 
each of which I know, and of these there are per- 
haps twenty or thirty with which I have had long 
relations of friendship. I would not have the 



THE PRIMEVAL FOREST 3 

woodman's axe touch any tree on this mountain 
for any money. Every one is a friend. Some, I 
cannot say why, by reason of one or another pecu- 
liarity, are special friends. You would not find it 
very easy to say what characteristics, differing from 
those of other persons, make the friends you chiefly 
love specially dear to you. Nor would it be pos- 
sible to say why certain trees in this vast forest 
always seem particularly precious in my eyes ; 
whether it is because of stateliness, or grace, or 
firmness, or calm strength that speaks of trust- 
worthiness, or because this one looks jovial and 
tosses his arms more recklessly, or that one is a 
seemingly sad old fellow, whose forlorn and weary 
look asks for sympathy. 

Often I have questioned one old friend concern- 
ing his life story, and he has silently told much of 
it; wherein is instruction. For the life of a tree 
has its resemblances to the life of a man, and the 
latter may find good example in the former. 

His youth was passed among difficult surround- 
ings, and the labor of living was arduous. He 
adopted early the motto of success, whether of 
a young tree or of a young man, "patience and 
perseverance. " The mountain - side was rocky, 
and the only soil was the dead dust of his 
ancestors, clinging among the stones, and mixed 
with the gravel of decaying granite. At the very 
start, when he sent out his young roots, they en- 



4 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

countered bowlders on every side. Haste and 
impatience would have ruined him, and left the 
bowlders masters of the situation. He directed 
his roots warily around them, feeling along their 
sides, and drinking rain that dripped from them, 
and thus the youth grew strong with the help of 
the obstacles that were in his way. So his full 
strength was attained, and his roots reached far 
and interlocked with the roots of his young friends, 
and they helped one another to stand up in the 
winds. 

All the time there had been one bowlder espe- 
cially obnoxious and obstructive. But he had 
been patient, and thrust a root between this and 
another, greater, which almost touched it. And 
that root thrived, and though strangely shaped and 
flattened between the rocks, was healthy, so that 
when the day of his strength arrived the bowlder 
was to him no more a trouble ; for with the abun- 
dant force in that root he quietly shoved the great 
rock out of his way and forgot it. So patience in 
the time of weakness prepares for victory in the 
time of strength. 

It is strange that with our changing flesh we bear 
always the scars of mishaps in childhood. It must 
be some hundreds of years since a squirrel in mid- 
winter (when squirrels feed on the tender tips of 
birch branches) ate rather deep, and stopped for- 
ever in the sapling the growth of that twig. But 



THE PRIMEVAL FOREST 5 

just below the end was a branching twig, which the 
squirrel let alone. Why? I don't know. How 
should I know what scared a squirrel on this moun- 
tain two hundred generations of squirrels ago ? 
The tree's history is recorded, but of the squirrel's 
nothing can be known except this one incident. 
How do we know it was a squirrel that bit off 
the twig ? I answer, how can you account for it 
otherwise ? Suggest a better theory, and we will 
accept it. That's the principle on which half the 
modern ologies go. Devise a theory and accept 
it as demonstrated truth, and rest your scientific 
faith on it, because no one has invented a better 
theory. I believe in the squirrel, and the evidence 
that a squirrel bit off that branch is as good as the 
evidence for nine-tenths of the supposed truths in 
modern progressive science. 

The small ungna'wed branch grew out nearly at 
a right angle to the main stem ; and there, when I 
first knew my old friend, was a huge knee, close to 
the tree trunk, in one of the branches nearly a foot 
in diameter, where the twig had started out from the 
little stem. 

I have often wondered what made other scars on 
the body and arms of my old friend. The stormy 
life he led I know all about. Who that has win- 
tered and summered in the hill country of New 
Hampshire does not know it ? Every winter was 
fierce with snow and frost and tempest. Every 



6 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

summer had its stretches of dry times among the 
rocks and gravel, three thousand feet above the 
sea, when the white blood ran slow and hot and 
feverish in the veins. And then came the summer 
storm, wild, mad, with thunder shaking the moun- 
tains, and lightning falling on one and another and 
another of the trees, sending them down riven and 
shattered, and then wind, such as winter knows not, 
heavy wind dragging wet clouds through the tree- 
tops with awful speed, howling by turns, and by 
turns hushing down to horrible silence before the 
next flash of the lightning and the next tremendous 
gust, wherein all the trees writhe and twist and 
toss their branches in hopeless struggling. But no 
— that is only the external manifestation in which 
the tree, like the strong man, seems at times to give 
way to the pressure of the trials that environ him. 
The agony is not hopeless. The strong trunk 
is not moved. Storms rarely reach the depths 
of the forest, where the trees, standing together, 
guard one another. When it is wildest and most 
fearful up in the tree-tops it is calm below, and 
the violent gale breathes only gentle breaths of soft, 
cool air in the depths of the forest. The compan- 
ionship of the trees in a great forest is a magnif- 
icent sight when a storm is raging over them. 

There were a dozen of them, near together, around 
my old friend, of about the same age. Their ances- 
tors had settled here together, among the spruce- 



THE PRIMEVAL FOREST 7 

trees and balsams. There is a water-course close by 
them, where in rains a torrent descends the moun- 
tain, and where in dry times some water is mostly 
always flowing down under the rocks and moss and 
oxalis. Birch -trees love such places, and looking 
up from the valley you can trace the lines of all the 
water-courses down the mountain, by the lighter- 
green foliage of birches contrasting with the dark 
green of the pines which cover most of the hill 
country where the axe has not done its devastating 
work. These old people have grown old together, 
and it is interesting to see how differently they have 
grown old, just as men do. 

Some were poorer and some were richer. But 
the wealth and the poverty had no relation to the 
land they lived on. It resulted from the stuff that 
was in them, the vigor of constitution, analogous to 
the will in a man. 

There is one mighty old fellow who stands di- 
rectly on the top of a rock, three or four feet in di- 
ameter, and who sent his roots down on three sides 
of it. So the tree stood on the rock as on a ped- 
estal, and you can see the big stone, hugged by 
the great roots, under the very centre of the 
trunk ; and he is stout and green and rugged, good, 
apparently, for a hundred years more. Life and 
success with him are due to determination and 
making the most of his small opportunities. 

There is another, who stood close by my old 



8 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

friend, and who is like some old men, shabby in his 
attire and utterly regardless of his appearance. He 
had the best of land, and had grown fat on it and 
lived sumptuously, and when old age came he grew 
cynical, despised the young modern slips of trees 
around him, then grew misanthropic and selfish 
and careless. You never saw such rags as the old 
wretch wears. They flutter in the wind around 
his miserable old body from the ground up for forty 
feet, streamers of bark, some long and black and 
scarcely holding to him, some rolled up in tight 
rolls, dingy and dirty. I remember him when he 
was a noble white-birch, and his dress was snow 
and gold, and when the afternoon sun shone slant- 
ing down the mountain I have seen the fringes of 
his robes touched with crimson and purple, and his 
apparel then was altogether royal. 

Why did not he go down instead of my kingly 
old friend ? The woods are full of graves of great 
trees, long green mounds, mossy and beautiful. 
Why has not that old fellow, who has nothing to 
live for, lain down to be covered up comfortably, 
and forgotten ? 

Many joyous memories are connected with my 
old friend. Once, years ago, as I came down the 
mountain, I found on his trunk a scrap of white 
paper, whereon a friend, strolling up the path thus 
far, but no farther, had written a few lines from 
Horace, and another few from Menander, and fast- 



THE PRIMEVAL FOREST g 

ened them there, where he was sure I would find 
them. Once, years ago, I sat on one of his great 
roots, and talked with a friend with whom I shall 
never talk again in the language of this world. 
Once, years ago, as I came down the zigzag path, 
I looked across the angle from two hundred feet 
above, and saw two lovers sitting at his foot, and 
knew they were telling, with eyes and lips, the old 
and never- too -old story of young hope. There 
are lovers in these forests sometimes ; for the 
Profile House is only three miles away, and Lone- 
some Lake has become one of the sights to see, 
and it is a charming stroll this way for those who 
love to wander and talk. They are old married 
people now, those lovers, but if they came here to- 
morrow they would not see any change in the 
forest ; for they took no note of trees or rocks or 
anything, but one of the other. And they would 
not miss the tree, or know that his is that huge 
trunk that lies all along the hill-side. 

One day I was walking down the path, and, as is 
my custom, sat down often to look at trees and 
plants and animals. A northwester was blowing, 
but this side of the mountain was sheltered, and 
only now and then a whirl of wind shook the tree- 
tops. I was looking down the hill-side towards my 
old friend. A red squirrel was standing on a dead 
branch, a few feet off, looking doubtingly at me. 
A woodpecker was at work on a trunk almost 



10 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

within reach of my hand. A white-throat sparrow 
was pouring out that long, sweet refrain which is 
most melodious of all forest sounds when heard as 
the sun is going down. 

There was a rustle of the breeze, and a sudden 
rising of the sound of the river down in the valley, 
which showed that for the moment the current of 
air was from the southeastward. And then there 
was a loud, crashing crack, and after it silence. 
What internal shock, what violent emotion, what 
that, to the tree, was like the sudden memory of a 
great joy or a great grief to an old man, had broken 
the stout old heart of my friend I cannot tell. 
Was it that breath of wind ? He fell towards it, 
not away from it. 

In the silence that followed the sound of the 
heart-breaking he seemed to be looking downward 
for a place to lie. Then slowly his lofty branches 
glided across among the branches of the other 
trees, and swept gently downward through them. 
Two of his companions reached out strong arms to 
catch and hold him up, but he slipped quietly out 
of their hold — vain hold now that all was over — 
and so lay down among the mosses. But he did 
not lie comfortably with his body on some small 
bowlder, and he lifted himself up with a convulsive 
spring, and then lay down again. Nor was he yet 
at ease. For a moment he turned a little, this 
way and that way, till he secured his bed of rest, 



THE PRIMEVAL FOREST II 

along among the rocks, and then there was perfect 
quiet. 

The south wind stole in softly over him. And 
the shabby old fellow, who ought to be lying there, 
fluttered his dirty rags, and seemed to be shaking 
himself from head to foot with unseemly laughter. 
Much as I abhor an axe, I am tempted to cut down 
that old tree. Better — some wet October day I 
will set fire to his rags, and see the column of flame 
shoot skyward around him. It will not hurt, only 
purify him, and he may send out young branches 
and be a better tree. 

No ; there is no science of forestry which can 
preserve the solemnity and beauty of the primeval 
forest. The one only law to be enforced from 
generation to generation is, " Let it alone." 



II 

A TROUT-STREAM 

There are no streams in all the world more 
beautiful and grand than are the streams which 
flow down the ravines of the Franconia Mountains 
and out into the valleys. It is not to be denied 
that the State of New Hampshire, by its legisla- 
tion or neglect of legislation, has reduced the value 
of the valley lands by destroying the beauty of 
these streams after they leave the mountain slopes. 
No one cares to build a country home on the bank 
of a river flowing with mush of saw-dust, unap- 
proachable except by wading in soft, rotten wood, 
foul with drifting slab stuff and the waste of saw- 
mills. To see water flowing in all the exhilaration 
of freedom you must go from the valley to the 
foot of the mountain, and meet the rivers where 
they come out from the forest. Or enter the forest 
high up on the mountain-side and find the spring 
brook, and follow it down the wild gorge through 
which it rushes, receiving constantly other streams, 
and growing into a torrent before it sweeps out on 
the level country and dies a miserable death, sud- 



A TROUT-STREAM 13 

denly losing all spirit, vigor, life, and beauty in the 
mill-dam. 

Pond Brook is the name of the stream which, 
flowing out of Echo Lake on the summit of Fran- 
conia Notch, wanders down through a dark ravine 
some four or five miles, always in primeval forest, 
until it emerges on the valley lands, and, after a mile 
of sunshine on fields and farms, is lost in Gale 
River. There are trout in Pond Brook, mostly 
small in the ravine, many large in the open coun- 
try. Times are not now what they once were here. 
Time was when this brook was one of the finest 
trout-streams in the world. But times have changed. 
A large manufacturing village, six miles away, turns 
out on every Sunday morning in April and May 
scores of men with poles and lines, who reduce 
the trout to a comparatively small number. I have 
counted, on a Sunday morning, thirteen rods fol- 
lowing one another within two hours along the 
bank where the brook meets the river. 

Nevertheless, the angler who cares less for the 
number and size of his fish than for the surround- 
ing joys which make trout-fishing so delightful will 
not fail to find his reward here, under the lofty 
slopes of Mount Lafayette, among the fields of 
Franconia Valley, than which no valley of America 
or Europe is more beautiful. 

There are spots of ideal beauty all along the 
stream, where I have been accustomed to linger, 



14 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

and forget, and remember. There is one such spot 
where the river cuts under its left bank for ten or a 
dozen rods, while the other shore is a broad stretch 
of gravel. It flows swiftly, three or four feet deep 
under the high bank, on which various bushes hang 
in a dense mass of foliage. Then it spreads out 
over a wider bed of cobble-stones, making as it 
descends two superb curves of beauty ; then takes a 
straight course down a rushing rapid for ten or fif- 
teen rods more. In this stretch of the stream I 
have, in the many years that I have fished Pond 
Brook, taken more trout and larger trout than in 
any other part of it. It is so open and free from 
trees and bushes on one shore, that you can use a 
fly rod with great comfort, and cover seventy or 
eighty feet with easy casting. 

It was warm, though late in the season, when I 
sat down there, the other day. Golden -rod and 
asters made the fields bright; once in a while a Va- 
nessa butterfly sailed along, and fluttered his choc- 
olate-black wings with old-gold borders close under 
my eyes as he paused for a whiff of my cigar. The 
remains of a barbed-wire fence skirted the top of 
the bank, an example of the fast prevailing bar- 
barism of the nineteenth century. There is no 
more barbaric custom in the history of mankind 
than the use of barbed wire to enclose fields. The 
express purpose is to hurt cattle. Without the 
hurting the barbs are useless, and plain wire would 



A TROUT-STREAM 1 5 

do as well. I have seen fine horses ruined by those 
abominations of modern fencing. 

It was a day to sit lazily on the river-bank and 
look around and think. I took my fly-book from 
my pocket and hunted through its leaves for some 
fly which might possibly call up a trout in the 
rapid. As I turned over the leaves, somewhat 
listlessly, I found myself thinking of something far 
away in time and space. It was a very clear mem- 
ory — or you might call it a vision, seen through the 
suns and the mists of more than a half-century. 
I saw another grassy meadow somewhat like this, 
and a stream not so large as this, winding its way 
through it. 

On the bank, or on a knoll a little way from the 
bank, sat an old man and a very small boy. The 
man was a tall, slender man, with a stoop in his 
shoulders, long arms, long legs, long, thin, gray hair 
hanging over his checked shirt, blue eyes, a sharp 
nose, an equally sharp chin. Every minute partic- 
ular of his dress and appearance came back to me 
distinctly. The boy was not yet five years old. 
But, young as he was, he was intensely interested in 
the instruction he was receiving. The old man 
was showing him the flies in his fly-book, telling 
him how he tied them, answering the innumerable 
questions of the little shaver whom he was teach- 
ing to take trout with the fly. 

For this man was a renowned angler; and, like all 



16 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

genuine anglers, was kind to little children, and took 
great delight in teaching this one the gentle art. 
At that moment he was explaining that no one 
ought to tie a fly for trout on anything stouter than 
a single horse-hair. We had no silk-worm snells 
and leaders in those days. Nor had we silk lines. 
His line was made of horse-hair, five or six strands, 
tapering down to three and two and one. His rod 
was hickory, two lengths spliced. I do not remem- 
ber the reel, but from later experiences I think it 
was a large, wooden, home-made reel. His lessons 
soon became practical. 

The little boy took the rod in both hands, and 
began casting, or trying to cast. The perverse 
line behaved as it always behaves with beginners. 
The old man patiently disentangled it from mullen- 
tops and tussocks of grass, and with careful fingers 
extracted the hooks, now from his own shirt and 
now from the boy's. Once in a while the cast went 
out well, and the boy with delight obeyed the in- 
structor, drawing, letting the flies go back on the 
current, drawing across, lifting the bobber and 
dancing it up on the ripples. And suddenly there 
was a rush at the tail fly. His little eyes were in- 
tently watching the cast, and the rush so startled 
him that he unconsciously jerked his rod and struck 
his first trout exactly as he should have struck him. 

Then came the struggle. He wanted to lift that 
fish out with a swing; but the old man held him 



A TROUT-STREAM 1 7 

firmly by his right arm, and compelled him to han- 
dle the rod correctly. It was a marvel, has been 
always since that day a marvel, why that single 
horse-hair did not break. It held on the gentle 
spring of the hickory rod while the fish went under 
one bank and under the other, while he went down 
stream and the reel paid out and the boy trotted 
in the deep grass following the trout, and the old 
man kept firm grasp on the right arm of the little 
angler. 

Yes, he was an angler then, and thereafter through 
all his life. He killed that trout, a half-pounder — 
he or the old man, who managed the rod by manag- 
ing his arm. And when the trout lay on the grass 
they two sat down again and talked. Many and 
many a time after that they two sat on the grass 
by the brook-side and talked. The old man died 
long ago. But I have in my fly-book a reminder of 
him — two flies which he tied when he was very old. 
It was seeing them that brought back this memory 
as I sat in the sunshine. 

While I read my fly-book after this fashion a 
grasshopper leaped on to the open page. I caught 
him, and I then caught three or four more, and 
threw them into the swift stream. They disap- 
peared in the current; but in a moment, sixty feet 
down stream, I saw a small fish rise and swash the 
water as he seized two of them in succession. 

So I stood up on the high grass-covered bank, 



18 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

and resumed fishing in fact instead of in fancy. I 
worked the water thoroughly, beginning with short 
casts and extending line till I had sixty or seventy 
feet out. Nothing rose. Then I paid out until the 
flies (I was using two) were more than a hundred 
feet away, swinging across and back, in and over 
the rushing water. I forgot that I was fishing, and 
watched the action of the flies, practising with them 
to make their actions life-like, thinking for the mo- 
ment only that I was dancing flies on a running 
stream. Then I began to reel in line, and the tail 
fly flapped in the current close to the bowlders on 
my shore, while the upper fly, a small golden pheas- 
ant feather, hung loosely, swinging in the air three 
or four inches above the water. There was a trout 
under those rocks. He had seen those flies for 
several minutes, and what he had thought about 
them must be matter of conjecture. Perhaps he 
suspected them to be shams. Perhaps he was 
not in a feeding mood. Probably he was in that 
condition in which men often find themselves, com- 
fortable and lazy, too much so to be easily induced 
to disturb himself. There are moral lessons to be 
learned in angling. Here was one. Temptation 
may be steadily withstood, but the moment of yield- 
ing comes like a flash. The price of successful 
resistance is eternal, unwavering, vigilant self-re- 
straint. Something that was very life-like, a flutter 
of the wing, a gleam of light on the golden feath- 



A TROUT-STREAM I 9 

er, a doubling or outstretching of the hackle legs, a 
curve in the water through which he was looking 
— something caught the trout intellect, broke into 
the caution with which he had surrounded himself, 
and he went with a rush for that fly. 

I, standing on the bank nearly a hundred feet up 
stream, and knowing nothing of the intellectual 
struggle going on in a trout's brain down there, 
was astonished and somewhat startled when a 
noble fish went into the air, sending a cloud of spray 
over the fly, and falling with his broad side on the 
hook. I had expected nothing so large. 

Trout take the fly in various ways. They are 
skilful, by experience. In many instances, when the 
fly is on or near the water, the fish strikes it with 
his tail, and turns swiftly to seize it in his mouth. 
It is a charming sight to watch an insect passing 
over a shallow where trout are numerous near the 
mouth of a cold brook or on a broad rapid, and 
see the tails of the fish dash water at him. Often 
you may see, as flies light on the water, the broad 
tail of a large fish swash over one, and then the 
swirl as the head swings around and the mouth 
takes in the half-drowned fly. It is very common, 
therefore, when fishing with flies to hook fish 
through the tail fin. Often a fish throws his whole 
body over an insect. 

Now and then a skilful trout will leap into the 
air, mouth open, and engulf a fly in his throat. 



20 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

This is an interesting sight when it occurs, for you 
will remember that looking from below the water 
into the air, unless the view be perpendicular, the 
line of vision is around a corner, along the angle 
of refraction of light. The insect is one, two, or 
more inches away from the straight line of vision, 
and if the fish leaps for the insect on the direct line 
of vision he will certainly miss him. Do trout 
learn by experience the principle of the refraction 
of light in passing through different mediums ? 

I did not hook this trout. He hooked himself. 
As he fell on the fly the hook pierced the skin 
just below the adipose fin, close to the tail fin. If 
he had been hooked in the regular way, in his 
mouth, I should probably have lost him because of 
what next occurred. The grassy bank on which I 
was standing was some ten feet above the stream, 
cut away in the spring freshets so that the turf 
extended to the edge, and the earth mixed with 
loose stone sloped steeply down to the rapid, bor- 
dered here with round water -w r orn stones fallen 
from this crumbling bank. The trout found a mor- 
al lesson at the fly end of my tackle concerning 
temptation. I found another lesson at the other 
extreme of the tackle, the butt of my rod, " Let 
him that thinketh he standeth," etc. 

As the fish leaped I suddenly stepped forward. 
The bank gave way like dry dust under my feet, 
and I sat down with a tremendous thud on the 



A TROUT STREAM 21 

edge of the sod. No, not on it, but in it, for I 
went down through it first with a crush of earth 
and dust and stones ; then, as my heels dug through 
the loose material below, with a slow but sure de- 
scent which nothing could arrest. I had but one 
hand to use, for the rod was in my right hand, 
and that fish was fighting like a tiger on the line, 
and the reel was paying out, and there was not 
more than thirty feet of line left on it, and below 
that rapid was a hole full of brush, whence one 
could never hope to recover hooks, much less a 
large trout. 

It was a bright day, with a clear sunshine glit- 
tering over the rapid. I remember distinctly how 
my high, black, water-proof boots shone as they de- 
scended into the glitter. The round stones con- 
tinually gave w r ay under me, and I sat down lower, 
lower, lower in swift progression, until I was sitting 
up to my waist in the river, my rod by some mys- 
terious instinct transferred from my right to my 
left hand, while with the former I was bracing my- 
self against a bowlder which was only a few inches 
under water. But for that bowlder I should have 
rolled over and over in the current. 

Standing up in a stream of water is not so easy 
as it may seem. Rising to your feet after sitting 
down in it is wholly another affair from getting up 
from the ground in the air. Without knowing it 
we stand, walk, sit up, move about, swing, and man- 



22 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

age our bodies by a continual exertion of mind as 
well as muscle. A dead man cannot stand. A 
child must learn by experience to walk, and by 
slow practice acquire the use of the countless 
muscles, from head and eyes to feet and toes, 
which are essential to standing, walking, and run- 
ning. All this experience we acquire in the air. 
In the water, where a pound of flesh no longer 
presses downward an avoirdupois pound, much of 
our atmospheric experience is useless. With a 
heavy medium like water around us, it is no easy 
thing to regain foothold once lost. This is why 
many persons are drowned in water in which, with 
due presence of mind, they could stand up on hard 
bottom and walk ashore. 

I swung my feet down -stream, and secured a 
rough hold for my heels. Then I transferred my 
rod again to the right hand, felt that the fish 
was on the hook, worked my body into a firm posi- 
tion, gradually found good foothold, and at last 
stood up in the river. Then I waded across to 
the shallow gravel bottom on the other side, and 
began to wonder at the continued vigor of that 
trout. For I did not know where the hook had 
pierced him. A trout struck and held by the 
mouth in a rapid, with his head up - stream, is 
quickly controlled. The gills, which are the lungs, 
soon yield to the rush of the water. It was a long 
time before I got that fish. I don't know how 



A TROUT-STREAM 23 

long. He weighed a trifle over three pounds and 
a half — a fine fish for a mountain stream which a 
hundred anglers visit every spring. 



Ill 

AN UP-COUNTRY ARTIST 

The sun was nearing the horizon. The road 
ran close by the side of the river. It was a nar- 
row road just there, and the river was but a small 
stream — a brooklet rather than a brook. But they 
call it the river, because far down the highland 
slopes, when it reaches the open country, having 
received all along its way supplies of water from 
thousands of springs, it is a river, turning the 
wheels of great mills, and, farther on, floating 
ships. 

Here it ran between grassy banks, crossing and 
recrossing the road, which was not even bridged 
over it. But as we drove on it grew stronger, and 
when another road joined that on which we were 
driving another stream came in also, and thereafter 
the road was better and the stream was larger. 
Soon the slope which had been gentle on the open 
upland became more steep. Road and river en- 
tered the forest, and plunged downhill together. 
They never separated for miles, the wagon -track 
following every bend and angle of the torrent, un- 



AN UP-COUNTRY ARTIST 25 

til, at the foot of the long descent, both together 
came out on a broad valley. 

Three or four miles across the valley we could 
see the white tower of a church and a mass of elm- 
trees which hid the village. But we did not 
sro on to the village. For as we left the forest 
and came out on the plain we parted company 
with the stream, which wandered away in green 
meadows, while the road passed in front of a 
farm-house, standing among sheds and barns, all 
looking old and weather-worn, but all in good 
order. 

The place had not changed in aspect since I 
drove up to the door of the old house forty odd 
years ago. The same stone-walls enclosed the fields, 
the same clematis vines ran over them, the same 
white spires of meadow-sweet stood up out of low 
green thickets, the same choke-cherry trees dangled 
their bunches of berries above them. The house 
was equally unchanged. And now, as I pulled up 
at the steps, the lapse of time was more difficult of 
realization when I saw an elderly man sitting on 
the little piazza. For just such a man, without 
coat or waistcoat or hat, with short gray beard and 
frizzly gray hair, sat there when I drove away from 
the house. 

Of course, I said to myself, this is not my old 
host, Eleazar Thorn. He must have gone to the 
church-yard company years ago. Who can it be ? 



26 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

"They tell me you keep travellers overnight 
once in a while," I said. 

" Yes, we give 'em such as we've got," was the 
answer; "we don't keep tavern, but when anyone 
comes along that wants to stay with us, why we try 
to make 'em comfortable." 

An hour or two later, sitting on the piazza with 
my host, whose name I had not yet learned, I asked: 
" What has become of the Thorn family that used 
to live here ?" He looked at me for a moment as if 
uncertain what to say ; then replied, " The old folks 
died long sence." "And Ezer?" I asked. Again 
he looked at me, now a little longer time, and at 
length said, " I'm Ezer ; but I don't remember you." 

It is not worth while to relate how I reminded 
him of the time when, in company with an artist 
friend, I spent a week at the house, and of the ur- 
gent advice then given him to cultivate his evident 
talent with the pencil. 

" Did you give it up entirely ?" 

"I haven't drawn a picture for more'n forty 
year." 

" Why did you give it up ?" 

He turned his eyes away from me, let them rove 
over the country, looked now for an instant at one 
thing, then looked to another, and at last said: "Well, 
I don't know as there was any particular reason, 
only, you see, little Susie died, and there wasn't any 
one to make pictures for." There was no special 



AN UP-COUNTRY ARTIST 27 

emotion in his voice. It was a simple matter of 
fact in his history which he was relating. But when 
I remembered the old time, there was in his answer 
a certain pathos. 

One evening, the first evening of our stay, we had 
come in from a long day's fishing, and, as we ap- 
proached the house, found Ezer sitting on the pi- 
azza step, and by his side a little girl of six years 
old. He was a large-framed and somewhat uncouth 
boy or young man. His hands were large, rough- 
ened with farm-work, and burned with sunshine. 
She was a pretty child, with a great lot of curls 
hanging from a well-shaped head, and a pair of eyes 
whose beauty I remember through almost a half- 
century. He was making pictures for her. He had 
a sheet of brown paper, the wrapper from off some 
package, and a broad carpenter's pencil. They two 
were having a jolly time. He was making rapid 
sketches. When he began one she would lean over, 
and with her bright eyes follow the broad lines as 
they went hither and thither over and around one 
another, until suddenly she would shout, " It's a 
cow," or " It's a crow," or " It's a fish," and, clap- 
ping her hands with delight, exclaim, " Make me 
another, Ezer." 

My companion, older than I, was an artist of 
fame in those days, and his work is not yet forgot- 
ten. You can see his pictures in galleries and read 
of him in books. He was greatly interested in the 



28 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

sketches made by the boy, and said that he had 
wonderful ability. He gave him hints, directions, 
instruction, and when he came away he said, " I 
shall be surprised if we do not one day hear more 
of that boy." But we did not. He never left the 
farm. The motive of the artist in him was only the 
love of the little one, his sister's child. When the 
child died the motive was gone forever. 

Nevertheless, he was an artist, and a great artist. 
For, after all, there is but one accurate measure of 
merit in any work of art — namely, its success in ac- 
complishing the purpose of its production. This 
principle is not understood as it should be. What- 
ever other ideas may be held as to the constituents 
of high art, the fact remains always that if the ar- 
tist have a purpose in his work and that purpose is 
not accomplished, he has failed ; if it be accomplish- 
ed, he has achieved success. The major part of 
criticism is wasted, because of neglect of this fun- 
damental principle. 

The domain of art production is immensely wider 
and more grand than the domain of that which is 
called criticism. In the arrangement of this world 
and of mankind in it, the divine order is that art 
shall supply the wants, minister to the desires, grat- 
ify the wishes of men. Nature is God's gift, and 
art is equally his endowment. That is a very nar- 
row, though it is a very common, belief that the 
purpose of high art is the product of works which 



AN UP-COUNTRY ARTIST 



29 



accord with the ideas and please the tastes of a lim- 
ited number of persons called educated people. 
The highest education in this world produces only 
a very little knowledge, and what is called culti- 
vated taste is full of error, egotism, and ignorance. 
If we ever attain to the superior knowledge of the 
immortals we shall know how little we knew here, 
how feeble were our ideas of the beautiful, how rude 
and rough and graceless were the pictures and stat- 
ues and poems and other works of our arts which 
some of us think ourselves able to pronounce im- 
mortal. The standards of merit which we shall 
then apply will not be such as we read about and 
try to apply here. And this, I think, is very certain : 
that when we look back at this life and its wants, 
its desires, and the small measure of supply to them 
which all our arts and artistic ability have fur- 
nished, we shall know that the standards we used 
were very untrustworthy. We shall see that every- 
where have been artists accomplishing as great 
work, in unknown ways, as those artists whose 
names are famous. There have indeed been thou- 
sands of artists in every country for every one 
whose name is recorded. There have been Mi- 
chael Angelos and Titians and Raphaels in almost 
every hamlet and village of the civilized world. 

There was a little girl who died last winter in a 
farm-house over the mountains. It was a lone- 
some place, two miles from any other house, and 



30 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

in the deep snows of the winter practically inac- 
cessible. The child suffered greatly for two months, 
lying on a bed in a small room off the kitchen. On 
the wall hung a cheap lithograph representing " The 
Guardian Angel." It was what you would call a 
wretched mess of color ; and when the mother 
showed it to me, telling the story, I confess that 
the angePs form and dress were to me suggestive 
of a cheap theatrical get-up, and the face was with- 
out expression. This was its beauty in my esti- 
mate. 

But there was something in that picture which 
won the child's heart. In her severest pain she 
gained fortitude and calm by fixing her eyes on it. 
Through the nights she waited for morning, to see 
it when daylight came in at the window. She was 
sometimes overheard talking to it. To her vision 
and the soul to which the vision ministers, the 
angel was one of the messengers of a land where 
all things are full of light and love and ineffable 
beauty. The poor lithograph rose in that room to 
the rank of the Sistine Madonna, or the San Marco 
saints of Fra Angelico. When she went at last to 
join other little children in the joy of Paradise she 
took w r ith her innumerable holy and pure thoughts, 
a soul refined and much educated for the new life, 
by the miserable daub, as you and I would have 
called it, which to her was the perfection of beauty. 

And it was as beautiful as any work of art ever 



AN UP-COUNTRY ARTIST 31 

made. Would you dare deny it to the child ? Will 
you argue it with her if you ever meet her ? The 
measure of beauty is in the mind that receives, not 
in any other mind. 

Our own conceptions of beauty change, not 
only with education, but with conditions of mind. 
Raphael could not have painted a picture to win 
that child's admiration away from her lithographed 
angel in blue and red. Had the child lived she 
might have grown to admire the Transfiguration in 
the Vatican, and she might even have grown to ad- 
mire Turner's blotches of mystery. There is no 
possibility of foreseeing what, in art production, we 
may be led to admire and enjoy by the circum- 
stances and associations into which we are led. 
Nor is there any authority which can tell us what 
we ought to enjoy. The notion of some writers that 
there is such an authority, a standard of beauty, is 
simply a proposal to take away freedom from art 
purchase and production, and destroy its power. 

The world for which that boy Eleazar worked 
was a small one, but he satisfied all its desires, 
gratified all its tastes, fulfilled all its imaginations. 
More no artist ever did. Jf you say that the great 
artist has greater thoughts than those of his race 
and age — a common saying, which sounds in idle 
words and has in it no intelligible truth — then he 
too, the farmer boy, had higher thoughts than he 
expressed with pencil. But of what value to you 



32 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

or to me or to any one are your imaginary " higher 
thoughts " of the artist if he cannot express them ? 
The world of art is a practical world. To all of 
us, in every station of life, come, sometimes often, 
overpowering thoughts, glimpses through mist and 
gloom of a higher life than we live ; conceptions, al- 
most but not quite formed, of greater achievements, 
nobler works than we are doing. But if we do not 
realize them, whether we be only commonplace 
laborers in the ordinary ways of life, or whether 
we be artists with chisel or pencil, these amount to 
nothing for the practical work of benefiting or 
pleasing ourselves or others. 

Sometimes it is said that time alone measures 
the merit of works of art ; that those which survive 
from generation to generation are the great works. 
This is a false notion. Often the greatest works 
have perished, having accomplished their purposes ; 
often the inferior have outlasted the changes of 
human tastes and fancies, and established for them- 
selves the name of greatness. You will find this 
to be true : that many of those works of art which 
are most renowned, most talked of, and most writ- 
ten about, produce in reality very little impression 
on those who look at them now. They are rather 
curiosities, which must be seen because celebrated, 
but they produce little effect on the independent 
mind. This is eminently true of many renowned 
statues and paintings. Its truth can be seen when 



AN UP-COUNTRY ARTIST 33 

the galleries and museums in which these works 
are preserved are crowded with visitors, and you 
observe how few linger around these specific works. 
Nor is it in any degree probable that if you, not 
knowing their origin, could to-day see works of 
Zeuxis or Apelles, you would find in them anything 
to admire. 

All this is wandering from the subject, though 
directly connected with it. Ezer Thorn was a 
great artist, although he worked for one only ad- 
mirer, and that one a six-year-old child. All his 
works perished as soon as executed — all but one. 
Late that evening, after he had gone to bed, I was 
sitting in the old kitchen alone, and, having finished 
reading the book I had brought with me, looked 
around for something else. Typography was scarce 
in that old house. My eye fell on a corner cup- 
board with^glass doors, which I opened. In it I 
found a large Bible. 

Whatever estimate you place on this book, my 
friend, it is a great book for one who wants some- 
thing to read. It is infinitely the greatest collec- 
tion of philosophy, poetry, history, law, known to 
the world of printing. 

As I opened this I found on the last fly-leaf a 
sketch which was doubtless one of the drawings 
made by the boy artist many years ago. In fact, 
next morning he confirmed my conjecture, and re- 
called the time when he made it. Susie had asked 



34 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

him to make a picture of an angel. He had never 
seen an angel, nor a picture of an angel. He did 
not know what ideas other people had of angels. 
So this w r as an original work. Such works are 
very rare, very rare indeed. All artists are copyists, 
in one or another sense. There are certain expres- 
sions of thought which have been handed down 
from age to age, which may be said to constitute 
the alphabet of art, with which artists write. An- 
gels have been made in pretty much the same way 
for centuries. They are always very human in ap- 
pearance. Some of the fifteenth - century artists 
made them seem more powerful and superhuman 
by giving them majestic wings ; but a later school 
reduced them to very lovely human forms, with 
wings which could not possibly lift those forms 
above the level of earth and earthly things. And 
mostly angels in art have been nine-tenths human 
with faint suggestion of the heavenly. 

This was a strange picture on the-fly leaf of the 
old Bible. It was a mysterious whirl as of clouds, 
but somehow all the clouds, when you had looked 
at them a while, seemed to be wings, no one inde- 
pendent of another. That which looked as if in 
the form of a wing was also part of the form of an- 
other and another. And there were eyes, not 
strongly drawn, in fact only to be seen as if by 
flashes, here and there and everywhere in the whirl- 
ing cloud of wings. There was no plagiarism here 



AN Ur-COUNTRY ARTIST 35 

on any other artist. It was a boy's struggle to re- 
duce into visible form his original but vague ideas. 
It was not a very successful struggle. 

It was in vain that I tried to get from the old 
man some indication of his ideas in that drawing. 
He had totally forgotten it and why he made it so. 
Only, he said, that was the last drawing he ever 
made for little Susie, sitting by her side when she 
was sick, and when she had asked him for the 
picture of an angel. He now studied it a long 
time. Then, oddly enough, he pointed out to me 
what I had not seen, some lines among the mists, 
which certainly assumed the form of a child, with 
garments trailing away into wings. 

" Now I remember," he said. " That was Susie ; 
the doctor had told me she was very sick ; I was 
afraid she w T as going to die. She did die soon 
after that. I thought of my little girl going away 
into a strange country alone, and among people she 
and I didn't know. She couldn't make anything 
out of my picture. Neither could I. I don't think 
I ever tried to make a picture after that one. It 
was such a dead failure." So he, like many other 
artists, failed because he essayed too much. Pos- 
sibly Susie might have been satisfied with the pict- 
ure in former days, but now she was near heaven, 
and had visions of angels which he had not. 

If you and I ever do see angels, what will we think 
of the pictures of them which we have been ac- 



3 6 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

customed to see here ? If we ever see the face of 
the Virgin Mother, most blessed of women, what 
.will we think of the pictures of her we have here 
admired — portraits of Roman harlots ? If we ever 
see the combined beauty and majesty of His face, 
what measure will we accord to the attempts of 
human art to make portraits of Him ? 



IV 

BEYOND 

It was in the midst of a crowded county fair. 
A man was lying on the ground, surrounded by a 
hundred others, who could hardly be kept from 
pushing one another on to the body which lay 
there, while two doctors were kneeling over it. 
" What's the matter t" was the universal outcry, 
and men were pressing in to see they knew not 
what, but something they supposed to be part of 
the show. Perhaps it w r as a pig with two heads, or 
a calf with six legs, or some other monstrosity. It 
had happened only a moment before. A drunken 
fellow had staggered against a horse, and then vi- 
ciously cursed and kicked the animal. The horse, 
rightly enough, kicked back, and the man fell. 
The medical men were together, examining the 
horses. Both sprang to the fallen man, and the 
crowd began to gather. 

" Poor Joe I" said one of the doctors, at length, 
looking up and around at the crowd. " Stand back, 
men — stand back." 

The circle widened at once, those behind yield- 



38 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

ing instantly when the low murmur passed from 
one to another that Joe Flint had been kicked by 
a horse and killed. 

" Is he dead, doctor ?" 

" Not dead, but he will be soon." 

Standing with the doctors before the occurrence, 
and standing by them now, was a tall, fine-looking 
man, the owner of several horses near by. He did 
not hear what the first one said, for his eyes were 
on the countenance of the other who knelt by the 
injured man, with his hand on his pulse and his 
gaze fixed on the changing face. After a little the 
doctor looked up and met the eyes of the tall 
farmer. 

" Is he badly hurt, doctor ?" 

" He's a dead man, Abner." 

" Dead !" 

" No, not yet, but—" 

The man lifted his hat from his head. One and 
another and another of the men around followed 
his example, and in a few seconds more than six- 
score of heads were bared, while silence grew and 
grew, spreading to the outer circle, and then through- 
out the grounds. One, two, three minutes might 
have passed when both the doctors rose, neither 
saying a word. But all around them knew that the 
man was dead. 

He was a miserable, drunken dog, a nuisance to 
the community, whose departure from it was gain 



BEYOND 39 

to all and loss to none. He was a profane wretch, 
a terror to children on the village street — a man out 
of whom had long ago gone almost all the char- 
acteristics which distinguish man from brute. No 
one regretted his death. Rather, as the news 
spread around, each person, man and woman, who 
heard that Joe Flint had been kicked dead by a 
horse he had provoked, felt, if it were not uttered 
by all as it was by some, that " it was a good rid- 
dance/' 

"Abner," said Dr. Gray, as they walked away 
from the scene, " I want to ask you a question." 

" Say on, doctor," said the other. 

11 Why did you take off your hat when I told you 
that Joe was not dead yet ? If you had waited till 
he was dead I would have asked no question. It 
is a common thing for men to uncover in the 
presence of death. But you did not take off your 
hat when I said he was a dead man, and you took 
it off when I said he was still alive." 

Abner Whitney was a man of remarkable char- 
acter in a New England community where were 
many notable men. A wealthy but a hard-working 
farmer, he had from boyhood been noted as an 
extensive reader of books, and yet more noted as 
a philosophical thinker. His unfailing kindliness 
of manner, his superior intellectual power, had 
made him the most influential man in the com- 
munity. He commanded the respect of all classes 



40 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

of people with whom he came in contact. Once 
he walked into the great hall of a large hotel, 
where were gathered men from all parts of the 
country. He wore his ordinary working -clothes, 
having come in on an errand concerning a load of 
hay. Attracted by a free discussion which was 
going on among the guests, he stopped to listen. 
One of the talkers, an eminent judge, catching 
sight of his face and the intelligence of his eye, 
suddenly appealed to him with " Isn't that so, my 
friend ?" Whereupon he took up the subject and 
expressed his views vigorously and clearly, in 
somewhat homely phrase, but with all the more 
effect on the group. As he was suddenly called 
away, a young man exclaimed aloud in the old 
phrase, " Why, he's a gentleman and a scholar." 

Yes, he was a gentleman, and his scholarship 
was of no mean order. He was silent for a little 
after the doctor's question, and at length said : 
" The fact is, doctor, I have always very great re- 
spect for any one that's dying. It began with me 
when the minister lost his little boy. You remem- 
ber. It was twenty years ago." He paused. 

" But you don't mean to say you had any feeling 
of respect for that poor devil, Joe." 

"Yes, I mean just that. When that little five- 
year-old boy died I was just beginning to think a 
good deal about — about — well, about things in 
general. I was everlastingly asking myself the 



BEYOND 41 

reason of things. And the more I thought and 
read the more I seemed to see that back of all that 
happens, from the growing of potatoes to the reg- 
ular rising of the sun, there was some cause that 
men couldn't find. And when the little fellow was 
nearing his end, it came across me while I was 
watching him that he was going behind the curtain 
I was trying to look through, and would soon know 
more than I about everything. You can't imagine, 
doctor, how large that small boy suddenly seemed 
to me. I can't tell you exactly what I mean by 
Marge,' but instead of the little one that I had 
carried about in my arms he was getting to be a 
giant. No, I hadn't any respect for Joe Flint while 
he was making a nuisance of himself here, but 
when you said he was only just alive, and going to 
die soon, why, I thought to mysdif how much that 
fellow was going to know in a little while. Doctor, 
Joe Flint at this moment is another sort of person 
than the Joe Flint we knew an hour ago. What 
he is or where he is, God knows. I don't care to 
imagine. But while he was here, a man like you 
and me, and I was looking at him, all the contempt I 
used to feel for him went away like a flash, and I 
took off my hat to a soul that was going in five 
minutes to know more than all the philosophers." 
Abner Whitney was a mighty man, of high soul, 
like the great Hebrew general whose name he bore. 
And, like him, he did in all things what he believed 



42 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

to be duty, loyal to his God, his country, his princi- 
ples ; and he did it all with a union of firmness and 
gentleness which gave him great power. The peo- 
ple in a wide district of country not only respected 
him, but loved him. It is not often that a man 
wins the love of his fellow-men. Abner Whitney 
had won it when a young man, and never lost it. 
It was not only his universal benevolence in acts ; 
but, in addition, the way in which he was benevo- 
lent — his manner, his voice, his tone — which com- 
manded the regard of even the rudest and rough- 
est among the people. It was often said of him 
that no one ever heard him speak harshly or with 
any appearance of unkindness in his heart, except 
once. 

Was that unkindness ? It was a strange occur- 
rence, which lived long in the memories and fire- 
side talks of the people. 

Abner and Enoch Whitney were half-brothers, 
sons of the same father, having different mothers. 
Enoch was four years older than Abner. From 
their childhood they had been of diverse character. 
When they grew up to be school-boys the several 
traits which marked their dispositions became more 
and more distinct. All the tendencies of Abner's 
life were towards the good ; all those of Enoch's 
were towards evil. Enoch was emphatically a 
bad boy. There was no ill that boys can do 
which he did not do, from robbing bird's-nests and 



BEYOND 43 

exploding fire-crackers in frogs' mouths to robbing 
choice fruit -trees and trampling down beds of 
choice flowers. Tradition told many stories of the 
patient affection which Abner showed his elder 
brother, the efforts he made to shield him from 
punishments, the unfailing devotion which he dis- 
played in spite of the uniform rebuffs which he 
met. He never looked for gratitude, and he never 
got it. Enoch was a rude cub, without a particle of 
brotherly affection, never grateful, never uttering a 
word of thanks for kindness ; but, on the contrary, 
ill-treating and abusing his younger brother on all 
occasions. 

The difference of four years in their age was 
overcome rapidly in their intellectual growth. The 
younger brother overtook the elder and passed 
him in school. The two entered college together 
in the same class, one at fifteen, the other at nine- 
teen. The former was an excellent scholar — a 
steady, persevering, and acquiring student. The 
latter was in all respects the reverse, and did not 
finish the course. 

When their father died the young men inherited 
a property regarded in those days as a respectable 
fortune. Enoch was a lawyer in the city, Abner 
having remained at home with his father and moth- 
er, cultivating the farm and managing the estate, 
which included some thousands of acres of timber 
land. 



44 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

The will of their father made a just and wise di- 
vision of his property between the sons, subject to 
the life interest of the widow, who survived her 
husband only a few years. Enoch was dissatisfied 
with the division, and attacked the will, alleging 
that his father had a weak mind, and that Abner 
had unduly influenced him. Abner defended his 
father's memory, and when the will was sustained, 
and no doubt remained of the wisdom and sanity 
of the father, offered to Enoch, as a free gift, the 
division which the latter had professed to think 
more just. Enoch accepted it, without thanks. 
Abner' s estate prospered. Enoch's vanished in 
disreputable speculations made in the city. Again 
and again, when in trouble, Enoch unblushingly 
applied to his brother for assistance, and never 
failed to receive the help he asked. Abner kept 
his secrets, and never spoke of his brother's char- 
acter or of what he had himself done for him. But 
there were lawyers and others, town -clerks and 
county registrars, who knew much of what was go- 
ing on, and who talked freely. The marvel of the 
whole country for years was the patience of Abner 
Whitney with his offending brother. 

But few, if any, knew the one chief offence oth- 
er than the seventy times seven minor offences of 
that miserable hound, Enoch Whitney. Abner had 
yielded to him many treasures. The greatest treas- 
ure of his life had been, from boyhood up, his love 



BEYOND 45 

for the minister's daughter. I say his love for her 
had been the treasure, for he did not possess her 
love. His brother won that away from him. For 
years Abner knew that she was secretly betrothed 
to Enoch, and that Enoch was playing fast and 
loose with her. Abner made no effort to win her, 
but he loved her just the same. No one knows 
the history of this episode in his life further than 
this : that Enoch won the confidence of the minis- 
ter, borrowed all his little estate, ruined him, and 
then ceased to see or write to Mabel. The min- 
ister came to Abner at last, as did all that were in 
trouble, and asked for advice in his old age. Ab- 
ner knew well all that the minister now told him, 
for he had eyes, and little that concerned the hap- 
piness of Mabel ever escaped his watchfulness. 
One great fact had escaped it. 

Do not imagine that in Abner's treatment of his 
brother there was any feebleness of mind or man- 
ner. It had long ago become well settled between 
them that the younger brother regarded the elder 
as an unmitigated scoundrel. Enoch never cheat- 
ed Abner but once, and after that Abner always 
recognized the attempted fraud and advanced the 
required loans, telling his brother very quietly 
what he recognized. There had been times when 
Abner conferred benefits on his brother, accom- 
panying them with urgent appeals to his reason, 
to his conscience, to the memory of their honest 



46 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

father. But he had ceased to do this long ago, as 
vanity of vanities. Now that the minister had 
asked his help, he sent for Enoch to come down 
into the country, and demanded of him an account- 
ing with the minister and his daughter. His power 
over his brother was ample, and he used it firmly. 
The revelation which his interposition brought 
about surprised him. That evening the two broth- 
ers walked into the parsonage together, and, while 
Enoch was silent, Abner deliberately showed the 
minister the state of his pecuniary affairs, and the 
arrangement he had made with his brother for 
their security, and then revealed the fact that 
Enoch and Mabel had been secretly married a 
year ago. He did not tell the minister that 
Enoch had denied the marriage, had laid his plans 
to repudiate it and destroy all evidence of it. 

Some years went by. Enoch had taken his wife 
to the city. Abner took care to be informed al- 
ways of the condition of his family. Enoch kept 
him well enough informed of his own pecuniary 
condition by applications whenever he was in trou- 
ble. Again and again and again the foolish scamp, 
growing more and more foolish and more scamp- 
ish as he grew older, attempted to deceive his 
brother, and seemed to deceive him, and as often 
the brother seemed to forgive him. Twenty times 
Abner relieved the actual distress of Mabel and 
her children on her application. For, ignorant al- 



BEYOND 47 

ways of Abner's love for her, Mabel never hes- 
itated to apply to the rich brother of her husband 
for aid ; and when she learned the real character of 
the man she had married, did not scruple to tell 
his brother what she had discovered. It is much 
to be feared that Mabel was not worth the love of 
such a man as Abner. But men of large mental 
size have often loved women of small intellectual 
measurement. 

One by one the three children of Enoch and 
Mabel died, and were brought to the country grave- 
yard and buried by their grandfather's side. While 
she was yet a young woman Mabel became an in- 
valid. The unkind treatment of her husband had 
much to do with the increase of her illness, and 
there were dark sayings among the people of the 
behavior of Enoch in the last few weeks of her 
wasted and joyless life. She died, and was brought 
to the family gathering, and Enoch stood by as 
they closed her grave. Some said he was broken 
down by grief ; but others, wiser, said, as Abner 
seized his arm and led him staggering away, that 
Enoch was drunk at the funeral of the wife he had 
killed. But no one ever heard from Abner one 
word of ill speech concerning Enoch, nor any sug- 
gestion of censure. 

But Abner Whitney was human. He had pas- 
sions like other men. It is small credit to a man 
or woman to be what is called "good" by nature. 



48 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

That self-restraint or discipline which suppresses 
the evil, curbs anger, produces calmness, gentle- 
ness, forbearance, kindness, in appearance and in 
fact, is far more admirable. That this man was 
exercising strong self-restraint all his life long in 
his dealings with his brother no one knew. Enoch 
had been, like many whom you and I know, a busi- 
ness man of reputation in the city, holding his 
head as high as any, while he was fit only for the 
jail of the felon. He finally reached his proper 
place, at a time when a spasm of virtue, seizing on 
the public, compelled the prosecution and punish- 
ment of some robbers. He had more than once 
forged his brother's signature and been forgiven. 
But the forgiving brother was powerless to save 
him now. He went to prison, and died in the 
course of his first year of convict life. It was said 
that in his prison life he gave some evidence of 
repentance. But people did not put much faith in 
the story. 

The country graveyard was on the hill by the 
church. There w r as only one tree in it, a giant old- 
growth pine, under whose shade was much pine 
trash and little verdure. Elsewhere the ground 
and the graves were covered with grass, long and 
yellow in September. The wind shook the grass 
in yellow waves. It moaned and soughed and 
sighed through the giant pine. The ground sloped 
away a little towards the east. It was noticeable, 



BEYOND 49 

though few notice it in country graveyards, that all 
the head-stones were at the western ends of the 
graves, and all the feet of those lying there were 
towards the east. And for some reason, perhaps 
the shape and slope of the ground, when you stood 
on the upper step of the stile coming over the 
stone-wall, and looked at that enclosure, it struck 
you at once as somewhat like a group of carriages 
or boats, and in winter-time always as a group of 
sleighs, going in close company eastward towards 
the country from which comes the dawn. 

All these had their feet towards Jerusalem, as 
the custom has been with the Christian dead for 
many ages. For the pilgrimage is not yet wholly 
accomplished, although they have laid down here 
their loads of humanity, and have found rest else- 
where while they wait for the dawn of the eternal 
day and for the voice of the Leader calling them 
to take up the humanity again, no longer heavy, 
because purified, and to go on in labors that do 
not weary and lives that are perfectly satisfied. 

One Sunday morning the minister, not Mabel's 
father — he was lying outside the church — the new 
minister, had preached a second- advent sermon. 
He believed very firmly in the personal return and 
reign of the Lord in some undated future. 

Abner Whitney was much impressed by the ser- 
mon, and after the service stood for half an hour 
in the graveyard with the minister, talking of the 



50 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

subject. It is impossible for any one who believes 
in the resurrection of the dead to stand in such a 
place and not picture to himself the scene one day 
to be visible there. The old man — he was now over 
seventy — stood near his father's grave and looked 
along the row of head-stones. The grave of the old 
minister, Mabel's father, was parallel with that of 
Abner's father, some ten or twelve feet distant. 
Mabel had been buried close by her father, be- 
tween him and her husband's father. There was 
space left between the two families for Enoch and 
Abner to lie side by side. 

He pondered a long time on that mysterious sub- 
ject — " What will they look like when they awake ? 
Will the children look like children ? Will the old 
folks have gray hair and pale cheeks ? Will Mabel 
look as she looked at twenty, or will she be the 
sad-eyed, worn woman we laid here ? Will I — will 
I — what will I look like ? What hour of my life 
has stamped this body for immortal identity ? Shall 
I be the boy of ten, the man of thirty, or old-look- 
ing, as I now am ? When Mabel and I look at one 
another again, will she see in my eyes the love of 
the school-boy and recognize it ? Or will she see 
the truth of that night when I learned that she 
was Enoch's wife ? What will I look like when I, 
with all the rest of them, wake and go towards Je- 
rusalem above, the mother of us all ?" And the 
thoughtful, perplexed man turned away from the 



BEYOND 51 

graves and walked homeward, pondering as he 
walked, until there came into his thoughts the only 
solution of this puzzling problem, and he exclaimed 
aloud, " I shall be satisfied with thy likeness when 
I awake." 

The next morning came word that Enoch was 
dead in prison. Abner went to the distant prison 
and brought the dead man home to the old house, 
and ordered all things fit for the funeral and burial. 
There was then, for two days, in his soul a great 
conflict. Had he done his duty to his brother al- 
ways ? Had he in truth and in heart forgiven him 
his countless offences ? Could he lay him in the 
grave and lie down by his side, and when the time 
for the rising should come could he stand up and 
say to Enoch and to Mabel, " Come, let us go for- 
ward together." To Mabel, yes. To Enoch, no ; 
unless perhaps in prison life there had been some 
change in that wretched character. 

All his life long this man Abner had been given 
to fierce mental struggles. That outwardly calm 
life was in reality one of frequent storms, tempests, 
cyclonic nights preceding serene days. The night 
before he buried Enoch was such a night. 

They stood around, all the people of the coun- 
try, as Abner followed the hearse. into the church- 
yard and up to the side of the grave. According 
to custom, there were two bars across the grave, on 
which the coffin was to be rested before lowering. 



52 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

Abner looked down into the grave, then up at the 
blue, and strained his eyes to see through it and 
beyond. He had seen the side of Mabel's coffin ex- 
posed. Stepping back, as they were lifting Enoch's 
coffin to place it on the rests, with the feet towards 
the east, he suddenly spoke out, in his deep, stern 
voice : 

" The other way ! The feet this way, the head 
that way !" 

He w r aved his hand swiftly as he spoke, indicat- 
ing a turning of the body. There was no mistaking 
his meaning. Men were accustomed to obey him ; 
and, though surprised, they now obeyed him. Prob- 
ably the minister, alone of all those there, fully ap- 
preciated the meaning of the incident. Even to 
him it was a revelation of the soul of Abner Whit- 
ney. As they two left the grave, Abner spoke, 
more to himself than to the minister : 

"My work is done. I have not judged him, and 
I will not judge him. In the time to come, when 
we rise, he shall first of all face her and me. I 
will give him my hand, and he may turn and go 
with us if God will. But perverse he has been all 
his life, and his way lay not towards the light. I 
have put him with his face set in his own way, 
which was always other than our way. I have 
done with him. He is in other hands." 

Abner Whitney is dead, and they have filled up 
the space between the grave of Enoch and that of 



BEYOND 53 

his father. It seems to me utterly impossible for 
any reasonable mind to form a just and satisfying 
theory of life which does not include immortality, 
the resurrection of the dead, heaven and hell. 



AN OLD ANGLER 

The wind was blowing freshly down the valley, 
the horses were in good order, and the country 
was springing up everywhere to greet the late but 
welcome spring. 

My destination was nowhere in particular. A 
trout-stream ran near the road-side. My horses 
know a trout-stream well, and are almost sure to 
stop without a touch on the reins if they see a 
good place for a cast. 

And this was just what they did that morning, 
though it was something more than a stream and 
good fishing-ground which arrested them. For on 
the green grass at the head of a sparkling pool, in 
a clear, rushing river, a rod or two from the road- 
side, a boy was kneeling and adjusting a cast of 
flies. The horses knew what the boy was at, and 
took it for granted this was the proper place to stop. 

"Are there trout in the river ?" I asked. 

" Oh yes, lots of 'em, but you can't catch 'em 
very easy ; anyhow I can't, but granther can, and 
I'm learnin' how." 



AN OLD ANGLER 55 

There was a clump of bushes between me and 
the head of the pool, but as the boy was speaking 
I saw a line with two flies go out into the air from 
behind the bushes, and the cast fell on the rip in 
the pool, and as it came up towards the foam there 
was a swash and dash of the water, and the line 
straightened out taut, and then cut the surface as 
it swung across towards us. As yet no rod or 
fisherman was visible, but in a few moments both 
emerged to view. 

An old man, wading in the shallow edge of the 
stream, stepping with caution, but firmly, came into 
view, his eye fixed steadily on the pool, and as full 
of light and brightness as a boy's eye. He knew 
what he was about, that w r as plain enough. He did 
not look up for some time, but when his glance 
caught the horses and buckboard, and met mine, 
he nodded cheerily, but quietly held to his work. 
It is quite as pleasant to see a fish handsomely 
taken as to take one yourself. He held his rod in 
the right hand, well up, and the bend away down 
to the butt spoke of a weighty fish. The first few 
rushes had been controlled before the angler came 
in sight, and now the trout was hanging low down 
in the water, and swinging slowly from side to side 
of the pool. Passing his rod to the left hand, he 
began to use the reel, with judgment, and the fish 
came nearer. Then he rushed, and the fingers left 
the reel to run, and the rod bowed a little down to 



56 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

the stream to ease the strain, and I saw his finger 
press on the line against the rod below the reel to 
make it drag more heavily. So the fish did not go 
into the swift water below the pool, but, yielding to 
the persuasion of the rod, turned and gave it up. 

In less than five minutes he lay on the green 
grass, and I weighed him — a plump three pounds ; 
and then I looked up to meet the smiling face of 
the old angler. 

"The boy says he is learning to take trout. I 
fancy he couldn't have a better teacher." 

" Well, I ought to know how to take them here. 
I've fished this river every spring nigh on to seventy 
years." 

" You began it young." 

" Not so very young. I'm eighty-one, and I've 
caught trout since I was seven years old." 

" And like it as well as ever ?" 

He looked first at me, then at the river, then up 
into the sky, and swept a glance around the scene 
before he replied. Then he said, with emphasis : 
" Yes, just the same as ever. When I had hold of 
that trout I was thinking of a four-pounder I took 
out of this pool when I wasn't fifteen years old, and 
I felt just as I felt then. I don't believe it's in 
human nature to change one bit in feeling about 
taking trout from ten years old to a hundred." 

There was a keen pleasure in talking with an 
experienced angler of this sort, and we talked as 



AN OLD ANGLER 57 

cheerily as anglers love to talk. He told me a 
great many things worth remembering about the 
habits of the fish in that river. For the habits of 
trout, like those of men, are different in different 
localities. Hence it is that books of instruction, 
and rules about flies for certain seasons, and writ- 
ten ways of fishing are of small account. My ex- 
perienced friend took no stock in the imitation 
theory. " Sometimes," he said, " but not often in 
this water, a trout takes a fly because it looks like 
a fly of the season ; but mostly, I think, they are 
tempted by the variety which is offered them in 
something alive and eatable which they haven't 
tasted before. A trout is a greedy eater. In the 
freshets he crowds his stomach with sticks and 
stones and everything which goes along in the 
thick water." 

" Are trout of this size plentiful here ?" 
" No, no. The river is well stocked ; but of late 
years the average size will not be much above a 
quarter pound. But every spring I get three or 
four fish running from two to three pounds, and 
a few pounders. There's another in the pool as 
large as this one. I saw them both rise a while ago. 
Will you try a cast ?" And he offered me his rod. 
"No, I will not interfere with your sport." 
" Not a bit of it. I would like to see another 
man take that fellow better than to take him my- 
self." 



58 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

" You belong to the true brotherhood," I said ; 
" but I will use my own rod." 

"Try this one. I made it myself last winter, a 
year ago, and it will serve you well." 

It was a capital rod, made of the wood of the 
tree commonly known as shad-blow or sugar-plum. 
He told me he had trained and straightened grow- 
ing trees for years before cutting them. The rod 
was in two pieces, spliced and wound, and weighed 
perhaps ten ounces. The line was of horse-hair, a 
marvel of braiding, without an end out anywhere to 
catch in the guide-rings ; and the flies a black tail- 
fly and a golden hackle bobber. I looked at him 
as I looked at them, and he answered my look. 
" Yes, they are all home-made." 

Surely it would have gladdened the soul of Izaak 
to meet this lover of the gentle art. For after I 
had cast in vain over the pool and wasted my ener- 
gies for naught, as he sent his flies down under the 
overhanging bank, where I had been with mine a 
dozen times, up came that other trout to the gold- 
en hackle, and, taking it, was taken. 

We passed the day together along the banks of 
the stream, going for an hour to his home near by 
for dinner, and coming out afterwards to talk rath- 
er than fish by the side of the w r ater. My friend 
was a very gentle old man. How could one be 
otherwise who had been for seventy years a lover 
of the most refining of all arts ! The valley in 



AN OLD ANGLER 59 

which he lived was very familiar to him, but famil- 
iarity had bred love, not contempt. He had never 
desired to live elsewhere. His life had been 
passed among scenes that were full of beauty, and 
their beauty had entered into and become part of 
his soul. He had no very extensive knowledge of 
books, but the few books he did know he knew 
well, and they were books worth knowing. Wise 
as men may grow, the wisest, after all, know but 
very little more than their fellows. And this calm 
life had given to him much knowledge which re- 
nowned philosophers have not, and could not have, 
but by just such experience and education as his. 

Before the sun had set we w r ere seated on the 
veranda of his house, and he was telling of his 
early life in it, with his wife, long gone. 

As, in after-years, I learned more about the char- 
acter of the old farmer and angler, I learned that 
he was very fond of living over again that long 
past, in which his house had been well filled with a 
large family. Now they had mostly scattered — 
some to the city, one to the Far West, two to the 
farther away country. These two were mother and 
daughter. And though it was more than forty 
years ago that they two went away, Isaac never 
ceased to be fond of talking about them, and al- 
ways talked of them only as " gone away." To 
hear him you would have supposed that they went 
away only a few days ago. The lapse of time had 



60 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

been to him as nothing since his wife and eldest 
daughter left him in the house with two sons, and 
nothing of womankind to be cared for or to care 
for him. 

He talked this evening of his wife, for something 
I said reminded him of something which she once 
said. A trifle was always enough to set him to 
thinking aloud of either his wife or child — Bessie 
the mother or Bessie the daughter. 

"Come along with me," he said, "and I'll show 
you what I call their portraits.'' And he led me a 
little way from the house through a grove, down a 
short, steep path, into a ravine — a very wild and 
very beautiful spot, especially at this moment. For 
it opened out to the westward, and the light that 
follows after sunset was pouring up between the 
overhanging trees and struggling against the brawl- 
ing stream. 

A little way up the brook was a high, large rock, 
much moss-covered, in the front of which was a 
curved hollow, forming a sort of rude niche or re- 
cess. There was a bench, ancient and decayed, 
made of a log, hewn flat on the top and supported 
on stones. Three persons could have been com- 
fortably seated on it. Overhead, on the top of the 
rock, were masses of fern, and groups of fern-moss 
were hanging on the side of the slope, making an 
exquisite drapery. The rocks in front of the bench 
were white and shining. For when the brook was 



AN OLD ANGLER 6l 

high it overflowed them. Altogether this was as 
beautiful a spot as you could well imagine. 

"There they are," said he, sitting down on a 
stone and fixing his eyes on the niche. " There 
they sit, just as they used to sit. What would I 
care for a painted picture of them two, when I can 
see them any day, sitting and working and talking." 

"But I can't see them," I said, "and you can't 
make your friends know them." 

" And it ain't important I should. They don't 
belong to you or to any one else. There's 'Siah 
Stevens, he lost his wife ten years ago, and he's got 
a painted picture of her. It was made for him by 
a first-rate man, too. They say he's a great artist. 
He used to board at 'Siah's in the summers. I 
never saw him painting. They said he didn't paint 
trees and mountains and such things, like most of 
them that come here. But he painted 'Siah's wife 
for him, and 'Siah shows it to everybody ; and 'Siah's 
got another wife, and they have new boarders now, 
and she shows the picture to them when they first 
come, and she says : ' That's 'Siah's first wife, and 

she was painted by the great Mr. , who used 

to board with us.' Us! Yes, she'd say us! But 
what's the good of that picture to 'Siah, I'd like 
to know. Sometimes, perhaps, when she was ex- 
pecting company and had fixed herself up, and set 
herself to look genteel, maybe she looked like it. 
But most o' the time Judith didn't look a bit like 



62 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

that. All the portraits I ever saw have the folks 
dressed up. Perhaps in cities the women -folk 
do keep all the time looking that way, and may- 
be their husbands and children remember them 
mostly in such dress, and it's right to get them 
painted so. But I should think a man would get 
tired of seeing his wife all the time in one colored 
dress, with her hair slicked, and the same fixings 
on her neck. No, I don't want any painted pict- 
ure of Bessie for myself, and no one else has any 
real care to know how she looked. If they ask 
you, you can tell 'em. And it's a great deal more 
important, then, to tell them how she looked to me 
than how she looked to strangers." 

I did not ask him, but he saw in my eyes the 
question ; and after a moment's silence he went on 
talking, in a somewhat low and dreamy voice. I 
will not attempt to write his words, but, oddly 
enough, it struck me at first, not oddly at all as it 
seemed on reflection, his description of his wife 
was more an account of the impressions left on his 
mind by her mind than any description of her per- 
son. Unconscious poet that Issac was, like By- 
ron's, his similes were of thoughts, not things. She 
was beautiful to him, he said, as beautiful as this 
very evening. And she was just as gentle and 
quiet in her ways as that streak of rosy cloud in 
the glow of sunset. She wasn't a softly, no-action 
girl or woman. She had a mind, and when she 



AN OLD ANGLER 63 

cared to show it she was knowing enough. But no 
one ever heard her speak a harsh word to man or 
boy or beast. " What color was her hair ? — well, 
it was the color of those pine-trees on the moun- 
tain this afternoon. " Now, my good friend, do not 
imagine that pine-trees on a mountain-side are 
green. There's no green about them sometimes, 
and when the evening sunlight is slanting over 
them they are often, as then, a golden brown. 

" Her eyes ? They were dark, dark as — dark as 
— dark as — well, they were dark as it is in the 
night sometimes when I'm lying awake thinking of 
her." 

u It has been a lonesome life for you." 
"No; not a bit so. I'm lonesome once in a 
while, but somehow I never yet seemed to get to 
thinking of her gone. Mostly it's with me as it 
used to be in the evenings when she was sitting 
on the other side of the table sewing, and the 
children had gone to bed, and I was tired o' the 
day's work, and we didn't talk much — mayhap nev- 
er said a word the whole evening. But we were 
just as contented to keep still, and I'm just as con- 
tent to keep still now and see her as I can all the 
time. You know it's a kind of selfish love for your 
friends that can't be happy except when you have 
them around you. I'm certain sure that she's hap- 
py, and I don't doubt she likes me to be happy, and 
I think she sees me much of the time just as I see 



64 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

her — I mean she sees into me. I know I think 
more of what she was than what she looked ; and 
that's the way I suppose she thinks of me now. 
These are pretty hard-looking hands," and he held 
up his brown, hard hands; "but I don't think she 
notices their color or much worries that they ain't 
as shapely as they were when I first knew her. But 
whatever they find to do I think the good Lord 
lets her know it's done as it was when she was 
here, honestly always, and I expect that's a com- 
fort to her. You see, when you come to have some 
one that's very close to you gone over to the other 
country, and you've put their body in the grave- 
yard, why, a sensible man gets to thinking more of 
himself as something else than his body. Other- 
wise, how can he think about them that's gone and 
keep on talking to them ?" 

"But, Isaac, they don't answer when we talk. 
That's the hardest part of it." 

"Now I ain't so sure of that. You see, the 
body's over there. She hasn't got any lips to 
speak words with, and you can't expect to hear 
what you used to hear. But it's just like this, 
according to my mind : When I was particularly 
glad, or particularly sorrowful and troubled about 
anything, many a time I'd sit and talk for an hour 
at a time at Bessie, and she'd listen and never say 
a loud word. But she'd answer, and say her say, 
all the same. I'd look at her, and she'd look sor- 



AN OLD ANGLKR 65 

ry, or kind o' smile, or her eyes would bright up, 
and all the time I was talking she'd be answering 
every word, and giving me her opinion, and what 
she thought I ought to do and how I ought to feel ; 
and it did me a great deal more good than if she'd 
talked it all out. Now I expect I get just the same 
kind of advice and comfort from her. Anyway, I 
tell her everything everyday, just as I used to." 

"You have discovered one of the great joys of 
life, my old friend," I said. " They who are gone 
away are doubtless waiting. For the end is not 
yet, and they, as also we, are still looking forward to 
another life, into which none will enter until all go 
together, in the body. Meantime, how much they 
know of us, and how much they say to us, in the 
voiceless language of the intellect, the universal 
language which all men of all times and nations, 
living here, or gone away, understand and use — 
how often they are the suggesters of our thoughts, 
the guides of our decisions, the promoters of our 
happiness, we cannot measure. They make the 
saddest error in life who bury their dead, body and 
soul, out of sight and out of reach, and consider 
them as sent away to wander alone until the resur- 
rection among the countless ghosts of all the hu- 
man race who have gone before. You have the 
true secret of happy lonesomeness, for you keep 
your dear ones around you, dear now as ever." 

"Why shouldn't I ? It's better and happier for 



66 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

them, too. Just suppose Bessie coming here to see 
and talk to me, and finding I wouldn't see her, 
wouldn't hear her, had set my mind that she was 
gone, and that was the end of it. Would it suit 
her?" 

Happy are they who live conscious that life is 
surrounded by an innumerable cloud of witnesses. 
Happy, too, they who have the beloved so close to 
them in their hearts and lives that they need no 
painted portraits to recall faces which would other- 
wise be forgotten. 

I accepted his invitation, and spent the night 
with him. In the morning, as I took the reins to 
drive off, the boy stood by, looking somewhat as if 
he would like to go away too and see the world. 
" Good-bye, my boy," I said. " Don't go away 
from here ; there's nothing in all the world worth 
leaving this spot to see ; grow up like your grand- 
father, to be a fisherman and a man." I consider 
the advice sound. I hope the boy will take it. 



VI 

DOUGHNUTS AND TOBACCO 

Have a cigar, or a pipe? Do you know much 
about art in pipes? There lies open a great field 
for an art book. Shapes and kinds of pipes have 
been described, but the art ornamentation of the 
great peace promoter must be in infinite variety and 
abounding beauty if one can judge from a few 
specimens. Look at that Persian sheeshee, with its 
elaborate arabesques in black enamel. Was there 
ever a more perfect gem than that Dresden pipe- 
bowl, painted with the myth of Cupid and Psyche? 
Or that Berlin porcelain head of a fish, colored from 
nature ? 

Coffee, tea, tobacco, the three luxuries which have 
delighted and enlightened mankind, have all three 
evoked the highest talent of artists, probably because 
they are alike luxuries which make men and women 
contemplative, receptive, ready to appreciate and 
calm to enjoy whatever is beautiful. The Turk 
drinks his coffee from an exquisite fingan, held by 
a zerf, on which Saracen art exhausts its richness. 
The Chinaman takes his tea from an egg-shell cup 



68 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

of wonderful fineness, blazoned with symbols of 
peace, home loves, good wishes, in enamels rivalling 
sapphires and rubies and emeralds. The North 
American Indian, however little he knows of sculpt- 
ure, carves his red pipe -bowl into some shape to 
please his eye, while the civilized smoker employs 
sculpture and painting to decorate his enjoyment. 

There are some men afflicted with the idea that 
these luxuries ought to be eradicated ; who worry 
themselves to death and write newspaper articles 
because people drink tea and coffee and smoke to- 
bacco. I don't know whether any of the anti tea 
and coffee men are left alive, but some anti-tobacco 
men still contrive to sustain existence. 

No anti -tobacco man has yet invented a reason 
against smoking which is not equally strong against 
ice-cream, water-ices, iced-water, apple-pie, or dough- 
nuts. 

The doughnut is a good subject of comparison. 
The prevalence of doughnut eating in the interior 
of New York and northern New England is appall- 
ing. Medical science which does not agree about 
tobacco is generally down on doughnuts. And 
doughnuts in the morning ! Think of them. In 
northern New England few breakfast - tables have 
been set for fifty years, public or private, without 
doughnuts. If up-country gravestones told truth 
you would find ten saying "died of doughnuts" 
where one said "died of tobacco." 



DOUGHNUTS AND TOBACCO 69 

The anti-tobacconist is fond of appealing to the 
statements of unknown medical men who have said 
tobacco is unhealthy. He knows perfectly well that 
for every one such there are two or ten medical men 
who deny that it is unhealthy. Medical science is 
that only on which doctors agree. The weight of 
medical opinion, backed by the practice of medical 
men, is in favor of smoking. We are not talking 
about excessive use of tobacco. Cold water in ex- 
cess is poison. Milk in excess is deadly. All medi- 
cal men agree that doughnuts are dangerous. 

" It is an expensive luxury." Yes, according to 
the tobacco you smoke. What if it is ? That is no 
reason why a man who has the money to spend 
should not spend it for tobacco, or doughnuts, or 
fine clothing, or beautiful and pleasant things. The 
argument may apply to the man who spends more 
than he ought, but is nonsense when carried to the 
extreme that all expense for luxuries is wrong. The 
men who use this argument against tobacco exhibit 
its fallacy in their own persons, clothed in luxuries 
where rough, undyed garments would answer all 
their needs. It is one of the notions of communism, 
which is unable to see the stagnation of equality in 
property. The arts of beauty, of making objects 
of luxury, are the support of modern civilizations. 
Repress expenditures to buying mere necessities of 
life, and one factory of cotton goods would supply 
the wants now supplied by ten \ ninety per cent, of 



70 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

the labor would be thrown out of employ ; com- 
merce would cease \ governments would perish. 

The duty of the man who has money to spend it 
on reasonable luxuries is beyond question, unless 
we agree to reduce life to barbaric conditions, for- 
bid all the refinements and adornments of civiliza- 
tion, live in huts, clothe ourselves in skins and un- 
dyed woollen stuffs in winter, and dispense with all 
clothing in August. No, we can't accept any argu- 
ment that our expenditures must be reduced to the 
bare necessities of life. We were made, by a good 
maker, with powers of enjoyment. Taste, smell, 
sight, hearing, touch, all are given, not only as means 
of life, but as means of receiving pleasure, gratifica- 
tion, delight. To be happy in the use of the senses 
is God's blessed gift to humanity. Some enjoy pie, 
cake, doughnuts ; some enjoy tobacco. The ex- 
pense is no argument against the man who, having 
the money wherewith to buy doughnuts or tobacco 
as he prefers, or both if he likes both, buys and 
smokes tobacco. 

But the anti-tobacco man says it makes a bad 
odor. He omits to say that it is bad to his nose. 
There is no greater impertinence than this of mak- 
ing your nose the governing nose in society. It is 
probable that a large majority of noses in America, 
Europe, Asia, and Africa, and in each country taken 
separately, regard the odor of tobacco as very 
agreeable. But that is nothing to the argument. 



DOUGHNUTS AND TOBACCO 71 

It only proves that odor is a matter of individual 
taste. If the odor is disagreeable to you, that is a 
first-rate argument that you should keep your nose 
out of the way of tobacco smoke. It is also a good 
argument against smoking in public places. But it 
is no argument against smoking at Lonesome Lake 
Cabin. You think it an evil that away up on the 
mountain, three thousand feet high, in the free winds, 
I smoke tobacco. Confine your attention to this 
point. It is a good way to get at the abstract ques- 
tion of the right or wrong of smoking tobacco. You 
will observe that all nasal considerations here are 
to be determined by my nose and not yours, and 
your argument on odor is not applicable. 

Do I hear you say that it is a bad odor, and I 
ought to dislike it ? Pardon me, but that is a com- 
mon sort of impertinence. Nothing is more ridic- 
ulous than to insist on our tastes as good, and other 
people's, which differ from ours, as bad. Your nose 
in not to be poked into other people's business. 
Probably you have always thought no one has a 
right to go into society with perfumes disagreeable 
to you, and that you have a perfect right to use 
musk or violet or geranium or anything that you 
think people ought to like. It is a great blunder. 
Your nose is for your guidance and gratification, 
not for mine. That is God's law, given with human 
senses. 

The odor of tobacco is not only pleasant to me, 



72 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

and pleasant to pretty much every one of the visit- 
ors to the cabin, but it is pleasant to the most 
lovely inhabitants of the world around. If on any 
sunny afternoon of summer you visit us among the 
mountains you may see a sight to do your heart 
good. When we sit in the soft air on the piazza 
smoking quietly, there are gorgeous butterflies, such 
as Cupid might well love, which scent the aroma 
from afar, and come hovering around, and light on 
our beards and mustaches. As the twilight falls 
over us, great sphinx-moths, rich in color and swift 
of wing, poise themselves in the air close to our 
faces, and breathe the odor which they love. 

But you say " tobacco stupefies the intellect and 
senses." Nonsense, man. Don't talk absurdities. 
It makes dull intellects brilliant, and gives brilliant 
intellects new vigor. It rests the weary, refreshes 
the worn, consoles the depressed. For every pro- 
found thinker since the seventeenth century, every 
great teacher, poet, philosopher, preacher, every 
man who has benefited the human race by his in- 
tellectual labor, for every one of these whom you 
can name as not a smoker of tobacco, you yourself 
know two or four or ten who smoked. Your argu- 
ment is so thoroughly and stupidly untrue that it 
never could have been uttered by one whose in- 
tellect did not need the awakening influence of 
tobacco. 

Perhaps you say " smoking leads to drinking." I 



DOUGHNUTS AND TOBACCO 73 

have heard anti-tobacco men say so. This is an- 
other absurdity, without a shadow of truth. Smok- 
ing allays thirst. Doughnuts lead to drinking. You 
can't eat two without taking a drink, and if there is 
any cider around you will be tempted. If there is 
no cider you will be drinking beer or whiskey or 
something bad for yon. No one can drink cold 
water with doughnuts. They don't go together in 
reason. This argument is good against doughnuts, 
but not worth a cent against tobacco. 

" But some men who smoke also drink." Yes, 
and some who smoke work, and study, and visit the 
poor, and are charitable and useful, and pray. Try 
the argument on that proposition and see what it is 
worth. 

After all, do you drop back on the last resort of 
the one who has no sensible argument and tries 
abuse ? You say that Dr. Somebody said a cigar 
was a thing with a fire at one end and a fool at the 
other. The only possible answer to such an argu- 
ment is in kind, and there can be no reasonable 
doubt, if he did say it, that Dr. Somebody was a 
donkey, whether his name be Aristotle or Franklin. 

And now, having exhausted argument and abuse, 
you ask me why I smoke. You want a reason in 
favor of smoking. I could give you a hundred, but 
one is all sufficient. I like it. I like good dough- 
nuts and I like good tobacco. That is conclusive 
and binding on you until you show it to be wrong. 



74 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

I like it. The scent of burning Latakia is sweeter 
to me than sickly roses or effeminate odors of violet. 
In the perfumed cloud are many visions. Why, 
man, it grew on Lebanon. Jebel-es-Sheik, Hermon 
of old, the sheik of mountains, looked from afar 
down the hill-slopes of Laodicea. Every evening 
refreshed the young plants with dews. The sun 
that rose in the morning from beyond Damascus 
and Palmyra and Nineveh shone on Jerusalem 
while it ripened them. The soil from which they 
rose is dust of Egyptian soldiers of Sesostris, flying 
Persians from the field of Issus, and pursuing Mace- 
donians. When the smoke rises from it, you can see 
wonderful shapes and shades that go floating among 
the rafters of my cabin, crowding one another, till, 
unless you have gotten used to them, you will be- 
gin to think of going out into the less uncanny and 
more familiar society of the woods and stars. You 
don't know what treasures are packed for thought- 
ful smokers in every bale of that tobacco. Each 
bunch of those leaves, in which history, imagination, 
and enjoyment are condensed as in few printed 
leaves, was chosen carefully by a son of Ishmael, 
and mingled, as he knew his friend's taste, with the 
Koranee, which gives life and force to the shapes 
and shadows born of the burning Latakia. He has 
sent me many small bales of those leaves, and from 
time to time I have given them away or burned 
them to call up the spirits. They remind me, too, 



DOUGHNUTS AND TOBACCO 75 

of him, and of the many times in years past that he 
and I have slept in the cool night air falling from 
Hermon, or looked clown in the morning from that 
hill -side at the blue beauty of Galilee. Till the 
next bale comes, if ever it come (for alas ! long si- 
lence bids me fear my friend is dead), that little 
remnant in the gazelle-skin bag is reserved for even- 
ings of happy memories. 

It is no light business, when a man is growing old 
with his pipe for a companion, to hurl at him a 
lot of your inanities about his bad habits. You, 
who do it, must be well assured that you are in 
sound mind and senses before you enter his house 
with your notions, your ideas of right and wrong, 
your nasal perceptions and affections. If you pre- 
fer in crowded rail-cars and public places to breathe 
hot, feverish breath, foul with the smell of all kinds 
of food and with diseases from all sorts of lungs, 
possibly others may prefer the breath purified by 
smoking some herb. In many countries where 
smoking is allowed in some and prohibited in other 
public carriages, nine-tenths of travellers, ladies as 
well as gentlemen, prefer to ride where smoking is 
allowed. Be sensible, then, and don't subject your- 
self to a reasonable charge that you are a mere 
public nuisance yourself with your constant iteration 
of your personal dislikes, and your everlasting pro- 
jecting of your nose into public notice. Contend as 
much as you please that men and women who use 



76 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

perfumes, who eat garlic, who perspire in hct work, 
who smoke tobacco, or who otherwise make them- 
selves perceptible to other people's noses should 
stay at home and not annoy those noses. That has 
nothing to do with the propriety of smoking tobacco 
in quiet homes like Lonesome Lake Cabin. 

It is so complete a puzzle to know what it is 
which worries the soul of the man who writes savage 
abuse of tobacco, that we, who would gladly relieve 
him, are unable to afford him any consolation. 

Come up to the cabin this summer, and learn to 
smoke. The first may, but I don't believe the 
second pipe will make you sick in this mountain 
atmosphere. And you will be a better man for it. 
You will feel better yourself, and take a more kindly 
view of the world, and of people whose noses are 
built on principles differing from yours. If you 
want to argue the question we will argue it. Only, 
before you come, go carefully over your prejudices 
against smoking, and see if your reasons do not 
apply with much the same force to doughnuts. 

I will not join you in an argument against dough- 
nuts. One must have some respect to his reputa- 
tion in New England. 



VII 

JOHN LEDYARD 

As you come up the Connecticut Valley to the 
mountain country you have without doubt often 
noticed the quiet beauty of the river under the 
forest-covered hill at the station of Hanover and 
Norwich. Hanover, with Dartmouth College, lies 
a half-mile or so from the station, on the New 
Hampshire side, concealed from the rail by the 
high land and trees on the eastern bank. 

Often as I pass on the rail or drive through Han- 
over and across the bridge to White River village I 
never fail to recall, in imagination, a scene on the 
river-side a hundred years ago, when a life of wan- 
dering may be said to have begun which thereafter 
led all over the world, and had sad and solemn end- 
ing on the bank of the Nile, within sight of the 
pyramid of Shoofou. 

When I was a boy the name of John Ledyard 
was more familiar to boys and men than now. 
Perhaps it was more familiar to me because he 
was a family relative, and my father had letters 



78 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

and memorials of him, at which I looked some- 
times with wondering interest. 

Dartmouth College had been in existence but 
two or three years when the Hartford boy w r as 
sent there to be in some sort under the direct 
charge of President Wheelock, a friend of the 
family. I call Ledyard a Hartford boy because, 
although born at Groton, he had been taken in 
hand by a relative, Thomas Seymour, of Hartford, 
and had been at school and commenced reading 
law in the Connecticut city. It was a small city 
then, and part of Ledyard's boyhood was passed 
in Mr. Seymour's house, which stood somewhere 
on the bank of Little River, now called Park River; 
then doubtless a clear stream. 

He was about twenty years old when his restless 
disposition made it evident that the law was not his 
vocation. He never could obey, and restraint of 
any kind was to him intolerable. Oddly enough 
he took to the notion of becoming a missionary. I 
suspect from the circumstances that he had vague 
ideas of the charm of life among the heathen and 
small concern about their souls. Dartmouth was 
in wild regions. Indian boys were students there. 
The idea of becoming a missionary among the 
savages was attractive. The very life at the col- 
lege in the northern wilderness presented tempting 
features. So with a horse and two-wheeled carriage 
he started, carrying his baggage and sundry posses- 



JOHN LEDYARD 79 

sions, for the long drive from Hartford to Hanover. 
There was no road, except here and there from one 
to another settlement. But he went safely through. 
It is a notable fact that this would-be missionary 
to the Indians carried with him the rude outfit of 
a theatre, scenery and curtains, wherewith to amuse 
himself and his college companions, white and cop- 
per colored. And it seems too that he established 
theatrical performances at Hanover, and I am not 
aware that Dr. Wheelock interfered to interrupt 
their successful run. 

A year or so at Hanover was all the restless boy 
could stand. Once during that year he had disap- 
peared for some months, and it is supposed had in 
that time roved among the Indians, perhaps, as 
far as Canada. The experience probaby dispelled 
the romance of missionary life, which had thus 
far inthralled his imagination. His horse and 
sulky were gone. History does not record their 
fate. He was far away from civilization. But 
daily he saw the strong flow of the Connecticut 
downward towards the distant sea, and across the 
sea lay the islands and countries of the great world, 
and many unknown countries full, in his fancy, of 
marvellous adventures. 

Close to the bank of the river he felled a great 
forest tree, whose vast trunk gave him a log fifty 
feet long and three feet in diameter. This he fash- 
ioned into a boat — not a canoe, as is sometimes 



80 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

written, but evidently a dugout. His college com- 
panions helped him, probably Indian boys as well 
as white boys. Did they know his purpose ? I 
fancy not. They were the pioneers of college boat- 
ing-clubs ; and as you whirl along the iron track to- 
day you can with fancy eye-glasses see across the 
river, under the overhanging trees, that group of 
jolly boys, working with fire and steel, burning and 
hewing, chatting and chattering, full of life and 
vigor and fun, while the vast log takes shape from 
day to day. They are all dead long ago. I have 
no catalogue of the Dartmouth alumni, and know 
nothing of any of them. Whatever their lives there- 
after, they were all more or less characterized by 
wondrous adventure. There never was a human 
life which had not in it passages of the sort we call 
romance — passages of deep emotion, strong con- 
flict, great pain or great joy. They are all dust 
now, those boys, and from the living flesh and bone 
and sinew that worked on Ledyard's boat at Dart- 
mouth in 1772 trees have grown large and strong — 
birches and maples here, palm-trees in Africa. 

The boat was finished, and in a starry night of 
April, when the river was running full with the 
melting snows of the mountain country, the young 
voyager stole down to the shore, pushed off into 
the current, and began his wanderings. 

He made choice of companionship which, incon- 
gruous as it may seem, was not strange when we 



JOHN LEDYARD 81 

consider his character. He had provisioned his 
boat, and took hi6 bear- skin for covering. For 
company he carried his Greek Testament and his 
Ovid, and drifting down the glorious river, than 
which none on earth runs through more beautiful 
and varied scenery, he lay rolled in his shaggy 
covering and read now the wildest romances of 
Greek and Roman mythology, now the eternal 
truths of revelation. 

Of his adventurous voyage we know nothing ex- 
cept that as he approached the gorge at Bellows 
Falls he was so intent on one or the other of his 
books that he barely escaped being drawn into the 
rapids and hurled to destruction. But he escaped, 
dragged his dugout around the falls, and resumed 
the voyage. So it happened that Mr. Seymour and 
his family in Hartford were surprised one sunny 
morning at seeing this strange craft coming from 
the Connecticut up the Little River, stopping in 
front of the house and discharging a solitary voy- 
ager, the once intended Indian missionary. 

Thereafter followed fifteen or sixteen years of 
roving life, realizing in the main all the imagina- 
tions of the boy. With Captain Cook he went 
around the world. Alone he penetrated the depths 
of Siberia. He was always travelling, travelling, 
travelling. 

It is not probable that at any time in all his 
fancies and forethinkings had ever come to him 



82 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

any imagination of the end, and least of all of such 
an end as he at last reached. In Cairo, whither he 
had gone with intent to cross Africa to the west- 
ern sea, and where he had concluded, after three 
months of anxious delay, an arrangement with an 
Arab merchant to take him a thousand miles and 
leave him then to force his own way to Timbuctoo, 
just at the moment of packing his luggage for the 
start, a sudden illness and a fatal overdose of med- 
icine arrested his wanderings on earth, and the 
restless boy of Dartmouth, the reckless voyager on 
the Connecticut, went suddenly, without scrip or 
purse, to see the wonders of the undiscovered coun- 
try. 

No one knows where he was buried. Elsewhere 
I have written of my vain attempts in Egypt in 
1855 to ascertain something about this. I renewed 
the inquiries a few years ago in Cairo. But the 
search was utterly hopeless. Even the Moslem lets 
his father's tomb crumble without repair, and an 
Eastern cemetery is always a ruined graveyard. But 
he was, of course, not buried in Mohammedan 
ground. Neither is it certain that Greek or Copt 
or Armenian or Latin would admit his poor dust to 
the companionship of their dust. It was a curious, 
a very remarkable search which I made, in all and 
every of the various monasteries and churches in 
Cairo, Fostat, and Boulak, seeking some trace of 
Ledyard's death or burial. I had long interviews 



JOHN LEDYARD 83 

with very aged clergymen, longer interviews with 
custodians of pretended records, which proved to 
be no records, and after all I was left to the long- 
est interviews with my own imaginations, in the 
wonderful glamour of Egyptian evening lights, when 
the sun was going or had gone down into the Lib- 
yan Desert. 

Many times every year I pass along the river- 
bank at Hanover, and see that group of boys under 
the trees hewing out the boat. Many times I have 
come up the river-side in the night, and have seen 
the solitary voyager drifting down the current 
under this same old sky. And so it occurs that 
while other travellers see only the beautiful river 
and the dark trees which still shade it from the 
forenoon sun, or perhaps the glitter of moon or 
stars in the ripples, I see more. For, unlike the 
boy who fancied far off a golden sunlight on a free 
and roving life, I see a straightened form, made 
for strength, but very still ; a face of exceeding 
beauty, but now set and calm ; surrounding people 
wearing strange robes, uttering no w r ords of sorrow; 
a grave in the yellow sand, where the desert meets 
the Nile flood \ the sun gone down, the twilight 
coming over the pyramids and flooding around the 
Mokattam hills, in haste to claim the valley for si- 
lence and gloom, the flood of the Nile flowing to 
meet the flood of the Connecticut in the one great 
sea, and the Hartford boy at rest, alone. But not 



84 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

alone. For the rivers of human life that have 
flowed in many ages through many valleys, like the 
rivers of Asia and Africa and America, have poured 
their counted and numbered drops into one great 
sea. And when Menes and Osirtasen and Thoth- 
mes come crowding back with the sons of Israel and 
Ishmael and the men of Phoenicia and Macedonia 
and Ethiopia, to seek in Egyptian dust their own 
dust, wherewith to be reclothed, the pale face of 
the Hartford boy will shine in the new light, and 
he will find the ashes which I vainly searched for. 



VIII 

THURSDAY-EVENING MEETING 

It was unusual for me to make such a blunder. 
I had forgotten the road directions given me five 
miles back, in the last of the twilight, and now it 
was dark — very dark — pitch dark. I was alone in 
my buckboard. It was blowing a gale, and the rain 
was driving in wet blankets. I was in haste, for 
the road was yet long before me, and the speed we 
had kept up till darkness came was still kept up. I 
could trust the horses reasonably well to turn out 
if they met anything, and as to driving, it was just 
no driving, but only sitting with reins in hand and 
letting things go. 

I did not see the school -house till I had come 
alongside of it. It stood at the fork of the road, 
and we had taken the right hand. As I caught 
sight of the little windows through which dim light 
shone out I knew that I was passing the school- 
house, where I had been told to take — Which was 
it — the right or the left ? I pulled suddenly on the 
reins and the horses slowed. The next instant I 
thought I remembered that I was to take the right- 



86 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

hand road, and on we went. Although at the in- 
stant I was not conscious that I had heard any- 
thing, yet for a second or two, as I went away, 
sounds from the school-house came faintly to my 
ears, and there was enough in them to assure me 
that I had heard, before I thought of it, the singing 
of a hymn by several voices. The tune was famil- 
iar. The words were, " Who are these in bright 
array, this innumerable throng ?" and then I was 
passing under a large tree, and the wind and the 
branches were making a sound which was like the 
roar of a cataract. 

In ten seconds I knew I was on the wrong road. 
The words of my direction came back suddenly and 
distinctly: "Left hand at the school- house, right 
hand fifty rods beyond it." So I pulled up and in- 
spected the position. You can turn a buckboard 
short around by getting out, taking the hind axle 
in your hand to lift the hind wheels around one 
way while with your other hand you turn horses 
and fore axle around the other way. This I did, 
and when it was done I lighted the lantern which 
hung over the front of the dash-board. 

Back we went to the school -house. And this 
time I listened. All was silent as I came near, 
then suddenly the voices broke out again with in- 
describable richness and melody : 

"Hunger, thirst, disease unknown, 
On immortal fruits they feed." 



THURSDAY-EVENING MEETING 87 

You say I thought it musical and melodious be- 
cause of the contrast with the howling storm in 
which I was driving. Possibly so. I don't know 
that that makes any difference in the fact. In all 
the arts, the correct test of the power — the merit — 
of the work is its effect on the individual whose 
opinion is concerned. 

As I turned slowly around the front of the little 
school-house I saw, standing in the porch, a boy of 
fifteen or thereabouts. " What's going on here ?" I 
asked him. 

" Parson's a-preachin' ; Thursday-evenin' meet- 
in','' he said. 

"Hold the reins; they won't move. Stand 
still, boys," I said to him and to the horses, and 
pushed open the door. 

There were just fifteen persons in the small 
room — five women, five men, five boys and girls. 
There were four candles lighted, two on the un- 
painted wooden desk of the teacher, two at the 
1 rear of the room, each in a tin candlestick on a 
scholar's desk. One of the men was in the chair 
at the teacher's end of the room. He was an old 
man with white hair. His face was one of much 
interest, and I would have been tempted to study 
its lines but for the fact that a light seemed to 
shine out of it which compelled notice. They 
were all singing, he with them, and the hymn ended 
as I stood in the doorway. 



88 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

There was music, melody, sublimity in that hymn 
sung in that little school-house by those people. 
Time was when the character of New England was 
full of the influence of such meetings as that, held 
in scattered school -houses all over the country. 
The student of American history will make griev- 
ous error who shall omit from his considerations 
the power of the Church exerted through the week- 
ly meetings as well as the Sunday services. They 
were largely prayer - meetings. This one was a 
prayer- meeting, and when, after a half- minute of 
silence, the man with the white hair began to pray, 
I fell on my knees in front of the door. People 
in the up-country of New England are not used to 
seeing men kneel when they pray. Only two girls 
and a boy saw me. The rest sat with their backs 
towards me, and dropped their heads forward. It 
was too late to change my position, nor was it nec- 
essary. I had knelt under the impulse of the 
voice, which was the soul of humble entreaty. The 
words with which he began, "We beseech thee," 
were as heaven-reaching in their tone as any re- 
sponse of choir or voice you ever heard in the 
litany. The prayer was brief, and every sentence 
in it was a compact petition, for I think every one 
could be found in Holy Writ. Before the people 
had raised their heads I had quietly come out, re- 
sumed the reins, and went plunging along the dark 
road in the tempest. 



THURSDAY EVENING MEETING 89 

But dark as it was, I was no longer alone. An 
innumerable company of thoughts, if not of per- 
sons, attended me. The voices of the stormy 
night were not, as before, confused sounds of nat- 
ure unrestrained. They became, and this without 
imagination, intelligible utterances of that Omnip- 
otence which governs the natural as well as the 
invisible world. 

For in this life of ours, wherein the employ- 
ments, the pleasures, the annoyances, the troubles, 
the griefs, the desires, and the successes or failures 
of men occupy all our attention and thought, there 
is nothing which so completely lifts a man out of 
his apparent surroundings into view of his real 
surroundings as prayer. Not necessarily his own 
prayer, but the sight, the sound of some one else 
praying. 

When men are sick and send for the minister, 
nothing which he can say to the sick man has any 
such power over the mind as what he says when he 
speaks to another world and the God who, he be- 
lieves, hears him. If you see and hear a person 
talking to another who is invisible to you, you do 
not doubt the existence of that other, unless the 
speaker is insane. So, when men hear the sound 
of prayer to God they have a strong conviction 
that the speaker is speaking to some one he knows, 
some one who hears him. And I am inclined to 
think that among the influences with which the 



go AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

character of New England was moulded in former 
years, none was more powerful than the prayer 
which boys and girls as they grew up were accus- 
tomed to hear, Sundays and week-days, addressed 
to the invisible God. 

They grew up with a consciousness of subjection 
to an authority higher than any which they made 
by voting at town-meeting. That sense of subjec- 
tion made better citizens than ever can be made 
without it. It is essential to a good and wise gov- 
ernor or master that he know how to obey, how to 
serve. The man who is conscious, or even who 
has only a vague idea of the existence of a power 
absolute over him and over his State and his coun- 
try, is a restrained man. And he is a happier, a 
more comfortable man. There is tremendous 
power and great satisfaction to the honest man in 
the knowledge that in the midst of his good and 
evil, pleasant and unpleasant surroundings, he can 
speak and be heard in a world very far away from 
this, and be heard by a willing hearer. 

Whatever you think about it, my friend, I think 
that the best part of the American character, the 
strength, the trustworthiness, the good blood of the 
body politic was in the prevalent consciousness of 
responsibility to God. There is not so much of it 
as there once was. The blood is thinner than it 
used to be in some parts of the body, and other 
parts show symptoms of blood poison. 



THURSDAY-EVENING MEETING 91 

As I drove on through forests which scarcely 
made the night seem any darker, now along the 
banks of wild torrents, now across fiats where the 
water lay deep over the road, I thought much as I 
have here written. And constantly would come to 
me the sound of that grand hymn, with its glorious 
vision of the throne and the white - robed hosts 
around it. And I thought of that little company, 
doubting much whether you can find anywhere fif- 
teen persons gathered in any assembly more of 
whom are worthy or likely to wear those robes. 



IX 

AN EASTER LONG AGO 

The village road ran due north and south. It 
was very broad, full a hundred and fifty feet, with 
large old trees on both sides, standing in not very 
straight line on the outer edge of the sidewalks. 
These trees were elms and maples, mostly, which 
had been planted by former generations. Among 
them stood an occasional horse-chestnut, later in- 
troductions. The elms were mighty trees, some of 
them gigantic, spreading their arms and hanging 
their long branches down over the wagon-road on 
one side and over the sidewalk and the front yards, 
and sometimes over the houses, on the other side. 
The houses were continuous, one yard adjoining 
another, on each side of the road (street, they 
called it there) for a quarter of a mile from the 
river bridge at one end to the cross-road corners at 
the other end of the village. At the cross-road 
stood the two churches, on corners diagonally op- 
posite one another, and on the alternate corners 
the village store — the only store — and the village 
tavern. 



AN EASTER LUNG AGO 93 

The Episcopal church stood in the graveyard, 
which stretched along up the road. The Presbyte- 
rian church had no graveyard. The village was a 
very old one ; the two churches were about equally 
old. For much more than a century the people of 
the village and of the rich farming country around 
it had been accustomed to worship according to 
the manners of their fathers — some in one, some in 
the other church. For the most part there had 
never been any religious controversy or any ten- 
dency to it among them while they lived, and when 
they died they all lay down peacefully side by side 
without controversy in the village burial-ground. 

There came a time when controversy arose. It 
came, as it often comes, from a cantankerous Chris- 
tian of one or the other church, who made himself 
offensive to a member of the other church, and 
thus began a quarrel. It was of no account at first. 
But as months and years went on the people — first 
the women, then the men — began to be ranged on 
the two sides of the dispute. What it was about 
no one now knows, and it is not altogether certain 
that in those days any one knew. Enough that it 
produced a very wide breach in the social constitu- 
tion of the neighborhood, which lasted for many 
years. 

The ablest and most influential man in the com- 
munity was Silas Lawton, a lawyer, a man of wealth 
for the times, an elder in the Presbyterian church, 



94 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

about fifty years old, living in a fine old house next 
door to the tavern. He was a gentleman by birth 
and habit of life, given to extensive reading, and 
the last man in the world to take part in a village 
quarrel of any kind. But none of us are free from 
the influences of our surroundings, and Mr. Lawton 
had persuaded himself that the most important 
question of the day for that neighborhood w T as 
whether the door of the Episcopal church was not 
the gate of hell. He probably came to a conclusion 
finally when he heard that his professional rival 
and personal friend Thompson, a church-warden of 
the Episcopal church, had said that he would as 
soon enter a heathen temple as a Presbyterian 
church. 

Here were two ordinarily sensible men, men of 
intelligence, behaving like two fools. And for that 
matter, on this subject all the community were fools 
— all except the two clergymen, who respected 
one another, recognized one another as earnest 
servants of one Master, and were accustomed to 
hold familiar intercourse. 

Something which the Episcopal clergyman had 
always done in his church, lighting some candles, 
or putting water into the communion wine, or wear- 
ing a peculiar dress — in short, some particular part 
of the ritual — had become a subject of talk, then of 
severe animadversion, among the people of the 
other church. And Silas Lawton had spoken very 



AN EASTER LONG A< 95 

strongly on the subject, and had then gone further 
and condemned everything in and about the Epis- 
copal church. In particular, he furnished to the 
village newspaper articles, not apparently contro- 
versial, on Church history, in which he demonstrat- 
ed to his own satisfaction that the Church calendar 
is all wrong, that Christmas is months out of the 
way, that Good Friday is not the anniversary of the 
Crucifixion, and that Easter is by no possibility the 
correct date of the Resurrection. In short, he made 
havoc of the whole business of Church anniversa- 
ries and celebrations, and rejoiced some people 
while he angered others. Thus religious animosi- 
ties were raging in the village when a series of 
events happened. 

It was in March — a cold, tempestuous March. 
Old Dr. Malen, the dependence of the people for 
forty years, died suddenly. Next day Silas Lawton's 
only child, Fanny, the best-loved, brightest, best- 
worth-loving girl of fourteen ever known, was taken 
sick. The nearest medical man lived twelve miles 
away. They sent for him, but he w r as off on a dis- 
tant visit, and word was left for him to come. But 
he did not come, and Fanny was very, very ill. 
All that night the wind made moans in the leafless 
elm-trees, and the soul of Silas Lawton was in an- 
guish. The morning brought no relief. There 
was plenty of sympathy, plenty of help from neigh- 
bors ; but help that did no good, for no one knew 



96 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

what was the matter with the girl. Why did not 
the doctor come ? It was not till another messen- 
ger had been sent and returned that they knew the 
reason. He too was sick. No help could be ex- 
pected there. 

Late in the afternoon a travelling-carriage drove 
up to the tavern door, and three persons sought 
lodging for the night. Their appearance produced 
a village sensation. Not a dozen of the people had 
ever before seen a Sister of any religious order. A 
horror of Roman Catholics characterized many 
such villages as this. It was soon reported that 
three " nuns " were at the tavern, and their jour- 
ney, whither and wherefore they were going, 
formed the subject of talk in every house that 
night. 

It came to the knowledge of these ladies by 
merest accident that there was great distress and 
anxiety in the house next to the tavern. They 
inquired the particulars, and the landlady told 
them all. The eldest of the three is described in 
the village traditions as of impressive appearance, 
speaking in a low voice which commanded atten- 
tion by its suppressed music, looking with eyes 
that gave one the idea they had no desire to see 
anything on earth — patient, calm, long-suffering 
eyes which expressed no emotion, unless patience 
be emotion. She sent the landlady to Silas Law- 
ton to say that a lady, a stranger, who had some 



\X EASTER LONG AGO 97 

knowledge of disease and medicine, proffered her 
help, if perchance she could be of any use. 

In brief time Fanny Lawton was in the best of 
hands. She was dangerously ill. Some say it was 
a case of lung-fever, inflammation of the lungs, or 
pneumonia in one of its forms. Others say it was 
a quick fever. Others have other theories. Those 
three Sisters fought the enemy all night. In the 
morning two of them went on with their carriage, 
but the eldest remained. It was a Thursday morn- 
ing. That day the opinions of people were some- 
what divided as to the course of Silas Lawton. 
Some thought he did well enough. Others thought 
he had taken a fearful risk in admitting this nun 
into his house, and especially to the side of his dy- 
ing daughter. Why, she might baptize her secretly, 
and so make a Romanist of her; or she might make 
the sign of the cross over her, and so do her some 
awful harm. Who could tell what evil might be 
done by such an emissary of Satan ? By Friday the 
opinions took definite shape, and Mr. Lawton was 
severely censured. 

He cared nothing and knew nothing of this vil- 
lage talk. His life was very much bound up in 
that child. His love for her was abounding, con- 
trolling. He had always known that he loved her, 
but he never knew a thousandth part how much. 
Therefore, time, village talk, all were unheeded, and 
his whole soul was intent on the fluctuating signs 
7 



9 8 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

of life or of death in that room. Powerless to do 
anything himself, he could only look on. But much 
he looked into the patient face of the unweary- 
ing nurse, much he sought some expression, some 
promise, out of those calm eyes, but in vain. Some- 
how, for a long time, when she was kneeling by 
the side of the bed, it never came into his head 
what she was doing, and doing so often. Then 
suddenly, when it flashed into his mind that she 
was praying, he fell on his knees. And when the 
landlady, who saw it, told of this outside, people 
said it was incredible that Silas Lawton should be 
seen kneeling and praying with a Roman Catholic. 

Friday and Saturday went by. It was late on 
Saturday night when the Sister told him that she 
believed the child would live. Still they watched 
by her all night. 

Again the wind was up, now a gale from the 
south, and the sounds, although perhaps to other 
ears the same, were to him wholly different. For 
now he had hope. He had more than hope. He 
had somehow confidence in that stranger, who 
seemed to him sent from God. The voices of nat- 
ure, which he had always heard, as most men hear 
them in accord with their mental conditions at the 
moment, now seemed to teach him new truths. In 
reality it was only that his own reasonable soul 
was teaching them, because for the first time in his 
life he was in a receptive state. 



AN EASTER LONG AGO 99 

Before daybreak the Sister told him she was sure 
that danger was past, and added that she had been 
so confident of it the evening before that she had 
arranged at the tavern for horses to take her on. 
He was startled, and at first tried to keep her. But 
no, she must go; and he could not but think she 
had done more than enough for him. He tried to 
thank her, but she said, simply, let us thank Him, 
and turned her face to the east, where were the signs 
of the dawn. Making a sign on her breast, she 
bowed her head. He did not make the sign, but 
bowed his head as well. 

Then over him came tumultuously a hundred 
thoughts — how in old times Christians had prayed, 
looking eastward, because thence comes the light 
of the world breaking on its darkness ; because 
thereaway are Jerusalem, and Calvary, and the 
Olive mountain whence He ascended ; because, 
because — what mattered it to him the reason now? 
— God had given him back his child through the 
faith and work of this woman, and he would thank 
God, looking eastward, westward, anyway-ward, now, 
and forever hereafter. 

And she went, leaving him happy but dazed. 
The sun was rising as she drove away. He saw it 
rise, and his eyes were tremulous or the air was 
tremulous or something intervened, for the sun 
danced, actually danced, in the hazy air which fol- 
lowed the southerly rain of the night. He looked 



IOO AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

down the road, eastward, whither the stranger had 
driven. He went in, and Fanny's eyes greeted him 
with a look that went to his heart. 

" Where is she, father ?" she whispered. 

"Gone away," he whispered back. 

" Where to ?" 

"I don't know." 

" I know," she said ; " there's a Catholic church 

and a convent at W , and it's only thirty miles, 

and she will be there by church-time." 

"Why by church-time?" 

"Why, father, it's Easter Sunday." 

Then he went out again and looked up the road, 
down which the sun was shining. Now he remem- 
bered about the sun dancing on Easter mornings, 
and the memory did not offend him. Now he be- 
gan to say to himself that he was in very close 
sympathy with every one who served the same Lord. 
He began to think — I cannot write what he thought, 
but this was what he did: He went into his little 
conservatory and cut every flower there, and made 
a splendid bouquet, and took it across the street 
and put it on the communion-table in front of the 
pulpit in the Presbyterian church. 

It was the first time he had ever offered a flower 
to God. When he had done it, it seemed to him 
wonderful that he had never done it before. And 
when, coming out, he met the minister and told 
him what he had done, the minister was glad, for 



AN EASTER LONG AGO IOI 

he had wanted some such help as he was now as- 
sured of. And they two judiciously guided things 
so that the people yielded their prejudices, and 
great peace followed in the community. The strong- 
est influence was that which came from the Sister. 
No one knew her name. She had only said she 
was Sister something — a Latin name they had not 
remembered. They began to think she was a good 
servant of her Master. And herein she had done 
His service in a way she did not know. Some time, 
in a country where there are no misunderstandings, 
some of those people will meet her. Many have 
already met her and know her by a new name, and 
all of them will understand one another, measuring 
each other by their likeness to Him. 



X 

AN OLD-TIME CHRISTMAS 

It was a great while ago. That expression con- 
veys various ideas of lapse of time. It may imply 
only a few months. To a child of ten it might 
mean five years. To you it may suggest ten thou- 
sand, a thousand, five hundred, a hundred, or fewer 
years. There is a country in which they do not 
measure time, as we do, by tiny watches or rolling 
worlds. I am thinking about that country to-night, 
as pretty much all of us do think more or less about 
it at this time of year. 

A library in one way illustrates the prophecy of 
the angel that " Time shall be no longer." Around 
me, as I write, covering all the walls from floor to 
ceiling, are books. Some are the everlasting, the 
imperishable thoughts and words of souls who, thou- 
sands of years ago, counted time as we count it, and 
who for thousands of years have ceased to count it. 
Others are of later ages, of men and women who 
lived and wrote when the sun and the planets and 
the stars stood in relations to one another quite 
different from those they now occupy ; of all the 



AN OI.lVTIMK CHRISTMAS 103 

successive ages, from the old Chaldean whose think- 
are cut in cuneiform on the seals which are 
reproduced in various modern volumes, down to the 
Christmas story writer of a.d. 1890. And all the 
books, the undying thoughts of people of dead and 
buried generations, stand solemnly together, all thor- 
oughly alive and wide awake, intelligent and intelligi- 
ble, living, speaking beings. The material things of 
the world measure time, and are worn and wasted 
by time ; the spiritual, the thoughts of men, remain 
immutable and powerful. The companionships 
of the immortals are not like our companionships 
who now know personally only the few who col- 
lide with us in this short life. Have not some of 
those, whose thoughts embodied in books are thus 
brought together in my library, also met one an- 
other ? 

Is there anything strange or improbable in the 
idea that two or three people, wholly unlike, may 
have met elsewhere, even by some such accident as 
caused the meeting of their thoughts on yonder 
shelf? It happened in a simple way. I had been 
referring to several authors, and their books lay in 
a pile. A child came into the library with a book 
in hand, which she had found in another part of the 
house. She read awhile and left the book lying on 
the old theologians, and so all the books happened 
to go up on the shelves together. Therefore I 
laughed a little when I saw the old picture-book, 



104 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

the History of Puss in Boots \ a thin book, squeezed 
tight between Thomas Aquinas on Job and Augus- 
tine De Civitate Dei. 

I don't know and I don't care who wrote Puss in 
Boots, though his thoughts do seem for the present 
as imperishable as those of the Philosophers of the 
Greeks and the Fathers of the Church. But on the 
fly-leaf of that book are, in manuscript, four words 
between two names ; the first the name of a boy, 
and the last that of her who gave the book to the 
boy " a long time ago." And the four words, em- 
balming the thought of one who wrote them, are 
as eloquent as any words of philosophy or theology 
— are words which in theology express the infinite 
difference between the Christian religion and every 
other religion. For in no other system does the 
idea appear, which is the foundation idea in the 
Christian faith, that the God who made and gov- 
erns is related to the man who neglects and forgets 
and rebels against him by the relationship of love. 
"With the love of" — those are the words between 
the two names. They were written on a Christmas 
Day a long time ago. 

There are several men and women, elderly peo- 
ple now, who remember the young beauty of " Cous- 
in Sarah" and her matronly beauty when she lived 
a centre of happiness and beneficence. On that 
Christmas Day, a long time ago, there were gathered 
in the old house a large company, mostly children, 



AN OLD-TIME CHRISTMAS 105 

who had come up from the city to spend Christmas 
week with grandfather and grandmother, hale old 
people. 

Sarah was the eldest of all the grandchildren, a 
woman grown, for she was twenty years old then, 
and she was the only one who had been brought up 
by the old people and still lived in the old home. 
All the others were much younger — from fifteen down 
to five. She was, in fact, hostess, and a capital one 
they thought her then. There had been the jolliest 
sort of a morning when the stockings were opened, 
and the customary tempest of young delight, which 
made the large house ring as it never rang but once 
a year with that purest of cheery music, the voices 
of happy children. 

All the morning Sarah had given herself to the 
innumerable cares of the household as well as to the 
fun of the children. Then to the door came the big 
sleigh, into which grandpa and grandma were stowed 
on the back seat, and as many small folks as pos- 
sible piled in ; and behind it came up Sarah's 
horses and cutter. You would have stood a long 
time in a colder day than that (the thermometer was 
ten below zero in the early morning) to look at that 
beautiful structure, the cutter, itself snow-white, with 
here and there a touch of gold. But you would 
have stood longer to look at the horses, magnificent 
blacks, with human eyes, full of gentleness and fire 
combined. And you would have looked with all 



106 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

your eyes had you seen that equipage when it rushed 
off in the brilliant sunshine, she holding the reins, a 
boy of six years old on either side of her in the cut- 
ter, only their small faces visible above the piles of 
white fox fur that filled the cutter. 

The church was three miles away, in a scattered 
little village. Service was not over till half-past 
twelve. Then, as she was taking the reins in her 
hands, the village doctor came up with a quick step. 

" I am sorry to tell you, Miss Sarah, that Tommy 
Grove is not doing well to-day. The fact is, I'm 
afraid, in our Christmas occupations, we have let 
him be forgotten, and — " 

" I have forgotten him. Thank you, doctor. I've 
neglected the boy, and to say I have been very busy 
is no excuse." 

" I— Really, Miss Sarah, I didn't—" 

" Yes, you did, doctor, and you did right, and I 
thank you heartily. It's not too late." 

Away went the horses — not towards home. A 
half-mile down the road they stopped before a 
small, shabby house, with a broken gate blocked 
open in a snow-drift, through or over which a nar- 
row trodden path led to the door. 

" Come in with me, boys. It will do you good." 

The interior would make a sorrowful Christmas 
picture. A bare room, with a little poor furniture, 
a good fire on a hearth where bricks were scarce, a 
round griddle hanging from a crane over the fire, a 



AN OLD-TIME CHRISTMAS 107 

pan of buckwheat batter on the floor, two cakes on 
the griddle, a stout woman in the middle of the 
room, and a sick boy in bed in the corner, scarcely 
to be seen through the smoke of the fat from the 
griddle which filled the room. 

The boy's little thin features lighted with a smile 
when he saw his visitor, and fell again when she 
told him she had only come to see him for a mo- 
ment. But he brightened again when she said she 
would come again before night. A few questions 
to him and to his mother, some cheery words, and 
all were out again in the cutter and flying over the 
country. It was seven miles to the town, where 
were the court-house and several stores. The 
black horses knew the road, and knew that their 
mistress was in a hurry. The sleigh-bells did not 
jingle or ring, but just swung out a sharp, shrill, 
tremulous cry of bronze, which cut the air like a 
knife as they swept townward. 

One mile from town there was something strange 
in sight ahead. You could see it a half-mile away. 
It was a drunken man, fallen over, out of the track, 
on the two-feet-deep snow, and lying as if dead. 
She pulled up by his side. The boys were afraid. 
Not she. She calmed them, got the drunken fellow 
on his feet close by the cutter, then tumbled him 
over into it. If he had been a stranger, doubtless 
she would have done the same, but this was no 
stranger. He was the son of her grandfather's 



108 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

old friend, long dead. He had been a brilliant 
man, educated and respected, now a vagabond. 
He lay still enough after she saw that his head 
was all right. 

The horses stopped in front of the principal 
store. A dozen ready hands relieved her of the 
miserable load, and relieved the two boys of the 
terror which had possessed their small souls for 
the last few minutes. In the store the scene was 
not as it would be to-day in such a store. The 
world had not then a thousandth part of the things 
for Christmas merry-making that we now have. 
Toys for children were few and simple. Books 
were scarce and expensive. While she was mak- 
ing her purchases one of the boys discovered that 
book, Puss in Boots, and the two together were en- 
raptured with the dauby pictures, colored by hand, 
wherein is shown how the bright cat enriched the 
marquis, her master. 

" Come, boys, it is time to be off." 

" Oh, Cousin Sarah, do look at this book ; it's so 
funny." 

" I'm in a great hurry. Bring the book with you, 
if you want it, Johnny." And back we went, like 
the wind, over the white road, and through the 
white land. Then, indeed, the boys thought noth- 
ing of that whiteness, nor did it enter their young 
heads that they were riding with Cousin Sarah in a 
holier light than that of sun on snow. The swift 



AN OLD TIME CHRISTMAS 109 

horses were not more heedless than they of the ra- 
diant company of angels who, in after-years when 
they recalled that sleigh-ride they knew must have 
accompanied them. The land, the fields, the hills, 
the road-side, all were white. But as that splendid 
vision flashed along the road the horses' feet filled 
all the air around them and behind them with dust 
of gold, as of the streets of the celestial city. 

Again they were in the room where the sick boy 
was wearying away the lonesome Christmas after- 
noon. In a moment, with tacks and hammer, parts 
of her purchase, she transformed the room into a 
gallery of art of wonderful beauty. Beauty, I say, 
for beauty is never in the object, but always in the 
eyes that look and see. Right well she knew that 
law — sensible, beautiful Cousin Sarah ; and she had 
sought and found beauty — not for herself, but for 
Tommy Grove. Children had not in those days 
the wonderful works of art which are now abun- 
dant. But she had selected from such as we then 
had. Tommy lay silent with open eyes, opening 
wider and wider, filling all the time fuller and full- 
er of joy while one and another and another were 
put up where he could see them easily. There 
were pink children playing, and "blue children pray- 
ing, young ones in sacred and profane history and 
story, and conspicuous among them all there was a 
somewhat rude, but to him how lovely, picture of a 
Mother, in blue robe and yellow kerchief, holding 



HO AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

in her arms a Child. It was the Christmas centre, 
centre of all beauty, now and forever. 

"Where have you been with these children, Sa- 
rah ?" asked the grandmother, as they came into 
the old house; and the grandfather looked the 
same question, both of them at the same moment 
looking also their entire love and trust. And 
when she said, " Grandpa, I had forgotten Tommy 
Grove," they looked at each other and said nothing. 
That evening she wrote in the Puss in Boots book 
the name of a six-year old boy " with the love of 
Cousin Sarah." And the book is not out of place 
between St. Thomas and St. Augustine. 

I am not that boy. A long time ago he died. 
Not so long time ago Cousin Sarah died. While 
she lived her life was a benediction to many young 
boys and girls, and to many others, old and young. 
There are some such people — not many — whose 
whole lives are, like that Christmas sleigh-ride, in 
the dust of celestial gold, in the sunshine of the 
better country, with continual attendance of angels. 
Only her thought, a loving thought for the boy, re- 
mains here in her handwriting. She now knows 
such saints as Elizabeth of Hungary ; and they, and 
such as they, are gathering roses in Paradise. 



XI 

ALONE AT THANKSGIVING 

The house stood near the road a half-mile or 
less from the church and store and tavern, which 
might be called the centre of the village. It was 
not much of a village ; only a dozen or so of houses 
seattered along the old country road. They were 
all old houses, and stood under old trees. For this 
was one of those villages, not uncommon, wherein 
life had been very much the same for several gen- 
erations, and that which we call progressive civil- 
ization had not invaded it. Even when a railway 
was constructed through the valley running paral- 
lel with the road, and a station was established 
fifty rods from the church, no one had been tempt- 
ed to build a new house, no increase was produced 
in the value of land, no mill or factory was erected 
on the bank of the stream. 

This house was the largest and best in the neigh- 
borhood. It was of the kind now called " colo- 
nial " ; a large two-story double frame-house, with 
a front door in the middle opening out on a porch 
a little wider than the door, and opening in to a 



112 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

broad hall which separated the two large rooms on 
the left from two like rooms on the right. It had 
an extension, an L in the rear, for the kitchen, and 
behind the kitchen a good-sized dairy-room, and 
beyond this a wood-shed, and beyond the wood- 
shed the stable and carriage -house, and beyond 
that the barns. Very sensible, roomy, comfortable 
houses are those old " colonial " houses. In the 
north country they were cool in summer and warm 
in winter, and when heavy snow-storms came the 
entire establishment, from front parlor to barn, was 
accessible to man or woman without going out-of- 
doors. There was one great fault in this plan, a 
plan which prevails still in the building of modern 
farm-houses in northern New England. That fault 
consists in the danger from fire. When a fire oc- 
curs in such a house in the countrv, where fire- 
engines are unknown, if it once gets beyond con- 
trol it sweeps everything in one conflagration. I 
have seen a fire starting in the barn work its de- 
stroying way to wood -house, dairy, and so on 
through the whole establishment, while a hundred 
men stood around powerless to arrest it. 

This old house w T as well kept up. Looking at it 
you would say that its owner was well-to-do. He 
was more. He was very rich. He had from youth 
up retained possession of the homestead, and all 
that was in it, and had lived there. Much of his 
time had been passed in the city, but he had no 



ALONE AT THANKSGIVING 113 

house there, and this was his home. Its ancient 
furniture was rich, and he had added to it abun- 
dant stores of luxury for the delight of the eye 
and the body. He was no miser. He valued 
money, rightly enough, only for its purchasing pow- 
er. But he had never for an instant conceived the 
idea of using that power to purchase any gratifica- 
tion for any one but himself. Whatever he wanted, 
whatever desire he had, whatever whim took pos- 
session of him, he used his wealth freely for his 
own pleasure. But never for the happiness of any 
one else. He lived for self and only self. 

It came to pass, as a matter of course, that as he 
grew to middle age he was a man without friends. 
In the village and thereabouts he was regarded very 
much as a stranger. The minister had long ago 
left him out of his books, for he had long ago with- 
drawn himself severely from all local associations, 
whether of church, or charity, or social life. In the 
city he was well known as a man of wealth, and had 
many acquaintances in the street and the clubs, but 
no friends. His intercourse with mankind, though 
outwardly cordial, with all the apparent friendliness 
which characterizes the surface of social and busi- 
ness life, was nevertheless purely formal, without 
heart or heartiness, and furnished no happiness for 
those solitary times when most men need some- 
thing warm and cheery to think about. This man 
was no rare and peculiar specimen of humanity. 



114 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

He was just what thousands of men are, of whom 
others say " he cares for nothing but business." 

There had been a good deal of autumn work on 
the home farm, and he had superintended it, not go- 
ing to town for several days. He had not been 
quite well. He had queer sounds in his ears and 
queer whirlings in his head. The week had been 
a succession of golden days, growing colder from 
day to day. It was nearly sunset, and he stood at 
the front window looking out over the landscape. 
The elm-trees which stood in front of the house 
were leafless. The road beyond them was dusty, 
and when a wagon went by clouds rose, reddened 
in the sunlight, and drifted out over the meadow on 
the other side of the road, where stood a group of his 
cattle waiting to be brought in to their night shelter. 
Beyond the meadow was the river, a noble stream, 
in which when he was a boy he had found trout 
plentiful, and, finding them, had found happiness. 

He did not know why it was this evening that 
looking over there he remembered his boyhood, and 
it was strange to him to recall that kind of happi- 
ness which he then enjoyed. He had never been 
unhappy ; he thought he had been on the whole a 
happy man ; but just now there was a queer thrill of 
delight, for one little instant, in his mind, as if he 
were no longer a strong man of fifty, but that boy, 
with other boys, down yonder on the bank of the 
river. When that thrill passed away he somehow 



AL( THANKSGIVING 115 

recognized that lie was now quite far from being as 
happy as he was once. 

The thought disturbed him, and he dismissed it 
impatiently, and turned to the side window, whence 
he looked down the road. There he saw the church 
and the church-yard behind it. There were no 
leaves on the intervening brush, and he could see, 
prominent among the stones, the monument which 
was over the graves of his father and his mother. 
He did not think of the words of just praise which 
were on the stone, and which all who knew them 
and all who did not know them could read. He 
thought of them as he knew them, and he couldn't 
help thinking of himself as they knew him. Thought 
is very swift. It takes but the time of a lightning- 
flash for one to review a long, a very long history. 
He saw them — his father, an honorable, God-fearing, 
neighbor-loving man, respected, loved, honored by 
all the people ; his mother, a calm-eyed lovely lady, 
to whom the rich and the poor alike looked with 
assurance of sympathy in sorrow and help in dis- 
tress. But chiefly he saw her as his mother, her 
look into his eyes, her exceeding beauty to him. 
How he loved, how he worshipped her ! And how 
she loved him, him her boy! It was but a flash of 
memory, and again he was himself, the man grown, 
and moulded by a life unknown to his father and- 
mother. When he was thus again himself he could 
not help thinking how great was the contrast be- 



Il6 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

tween that old life and this in one respect, that now 
no one loved him. And that thought lingered. 

He tried to laugh it away as sentimental. But it 
would not be laughed away. For it is a serious, 
solemn thought, involving all that concerns one's 
character and life. Not to have the love of any 
one, man or woman, boy or girl, is a terrible afflic- 
tion, and most terrible to him who says he does 
not want it ! For such saying argues that the 
man isn't worth loving, and therefore that the soon- 
er he is under the sod and out of the way the 
sooner his place may be filled for the good of so- 
ciety. 

He had never loved or been loved by any woman 
but his mother. So he now said to himself. And 
yet as he said it he turned from the window and, 
crossing the room, stood before a picture which hung 
on the wall. He possessed many superb pictures 
by renowned artists. There was an Old Crome, the 
envy of connoisseurs, a Gainsborough whose gen- 
uineness was not to be impeached, a Cuyp of ex- 
quisite beauty. There were a dozen other paintings 
in his room, landscapes and figure pieces, each of 
which was a gem. He had good taste, and had grat- 
ified it always. But he walked directly over to the 
place where was hanging a painting by an unknown 
artist, which he had bought simply because he liked 
it. He stood before it and looked into the face of 
a young country girl holding her apron full of wild 



ALONE AT THANKSGIVING 117 

flowers and shading her eyes from the sun with her 
uplifted hand. 

He looked at that face but an instant. Perhaps 
there is no reason for the conjecture that that fair 
countenance resembled a face he had seen in the 
life. Perhaps it was a foolish fancy of his that if he 
ever met that girl in flesh and blood he could ask 
her to love him. Perhaps — but imagination here is 
vain. 

He had stood there but a moment when the but- 
ler opened the folding-doors and announced that din- 
ner was served. He dined alone as usual. His 
table shone with bright light on silver and old por- 
celain and glass. He sat facing the fireplace. 
Above it was the old wooden mantel-piece, its white 
front ornamented with charming reliefs, vases, and 
wreaths. The chairs were the ancient family chairs — 
heavy mahogany. The very fire-irons, with their 
brass mountings, the andirons, tongs, shovel, poker, 
all were the old irons handled by the old folks, and 
by himself when he was a boy in this room. 

It was a struggle now to keep down memories, 
and he gave up the struggle and let them have their 
way, for they were rather cold memories and did not 
disturb him at the first. But they grew warmer 
as the solitary dinner progressed, and he began to 
ask himself why, on this particular evening, such a 
crowd of them pressed in on him. It was not till a 
little later that he knew. He was somewhat of an 



Il8 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

epicure. His servants knew his ways and what he 
liked, and he gave no orders for his meals. That 
was their business. Now as the butler lifted the 
cover from the silver soup-tureen he recalled the old 
time when the tureen was a mighty old Staffordshire 
vessel, cream white with bright green ruffled edge, 
and his mother filled the soup-plates for six children 
around the table, five daughters all dead long ago, 
and one son now dining here alone. 

He remembered the face and form of Tacitus, the 
old colored butler of those days. He saw for a 
moment across the room the white-aproned Delia. 
wife of Tacitus, waiting to wait on Tacitus should 
need be. He saw all that was there forty years ago, 
and a very unpleasant dinner he had of it. For all 
this remembering of old times and early life was 
not to his liking. He had long ago moved out of 
that life and its relationships. It was his custom to 
drink at dinner only a sparkling table water, until 
he arrived at the fruit, when he always took his 
bottle of wine and finished it with his cigar. He 
drank usually a plain, sound Burgundy of medium 
grade, Macon or Pommard ; but once in a while, 
say on New Year's Day or Fourth of July, he would 
take a higher grade of wine of the vineyards of gold, 
perhaps Romanee or Richebourg or Vougeot. For 
in his cellar he had ample stock of fine wines, which 
he used temperately. 

It was a surprise to him when taking up his glass 



ALONE AT THANKSGIVING 119 

of wine, which his servant had filled, and lifting it 
towards his lips he recognized the aroma of Vougeot. 

11 Why is this, Paolo ?" he asked. 

"I thought, sir, you would wish some good wine 
to-day." 

11 Why to-day P 1 ' 

" Surely, sir, to-day is what you call Thanksgiving. ,, 

Thanksgiving Day ! Hopeless now to struggle 
with those crowding memories. What man who 
was a Connecticut boy forty years ago can expel 
from his mind the memories of home on that a ay ? 
He was not an emotional man. He gave no ex- 
ternal sign of the internal tumult. He smoked his 
cigar and drank a single glass of wine, and thought, 
and thought, and thought. He left the table and 
walked into the front room, and sat in the large 
chair by the window, and looked out at the light of 
the full moon and thought. He lay back in his chair 
and looked across at that girl's picture, lie by a 
strong bar of light from the dining-room — that bright 
and beautiful face which looked back at him • and 
the riot of his thinking became tumultuous. 

"The past," he said to himself, "was full of peo- 
ple, and the future will be full of people, and I am 
alone among them all. Alone ! What have I ever 
done for any man or woman or child, any being in 
the universe, that that person should thank God that 
he made me; that that person should come up to 
me and say, C I thank you 1 ? Alone! I am alone 






120 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

now ; and when I go where there is no buying and 
selling, and no one to care for me as a buyer or 
seller, I shall be absolutely alone. What is the cur- 
rency of that country where my father and mother 
now are ? Not gold or silver ! What was that old 
song the mother used to sing in this very room ? 

11 ' There nectar and ambrosie spring ; there musk and civet 
sweet ; 
There many a fair and dainty drug is trod down under 
feet.' 

If I go there without money in my purse, wherewith 
am I to buy those dainties? Wherewith am I to 
buy the bread of life ? What shall I live on ? Why, 
the currency of that country is love. The bread 
of that life is love. So my mother told me. Have 
I any to carry with me when I go ? Shall I find 
any one who has any to lend me, or pay me, or to 
give me there ? Did I ever give a gift or do a good 
thing to any one, young or old, rich or poor — any- 
thing for which I did not expect, demand, and get 
full repayment ? Does any one on earth, in heaven 
or hell, owe me one iota of kindness, gratitude, love? 
'Lay up treasure; lay up treasure — ' What was 
that advice I used to get from the old folks here ?" 
Vain were it to attempt an analysis of the crush 
and crash of thoughts which filled the brain and 
bewildered the intellect of the strong man, around 
whom were now gathering profound shadows. He 
sat there motionless. The servants cleared away 



ALONE AT THANKSGIVING 121 

the table in the other room, and wondered to see 
him sitting by the window in the dim light. They 
went away to their own part of the house, leaving 
him, as was their custom, to the solitary occupation 
of the great house. Towards midnight one of them 
came into the dining-room to put out the lights. He 
was still sitting there. When they came to lay the 
breakfast-table in the morning he was still there. 
Had his soul gone out beyond the November moon- 
light — out into the unknown light or unknown dark- 
ness, into the cold, shivering, alone? 

No! Better, perhaps, if it had — or, at least, as well. 

What visions, memories, imaginings, what peni- 
tences or what despairs, were in that imprisoned 
soul then and thereafter no one knows. The house 
is there, the pictures are there, the furniture, the 
fire-irons, the porcelains and glass and silver are 
there. But the sunshine never finds its way through 
the closed shutters. The wine is ripening in the 
cellar bins, but for whose lips no one can tell. The 
man himself is there, body and soul, in an upper 
room, in that mysterious condition, more mysterious 
than death, which forbids intelligent intercourse be- 
tween an imprisoned mind and the world around it. 
But his great fortune, accumulating under the care 
of strangers, is just as useful to him and to his fel- 
low-men — no less, no more — as it was when his fin- 
gers gathered the coins together, and grasped them 
and held them. 



XII 

HOW THE OLD LADY BEAT JOHN 

We had been driving out some miles in the after- 
noon, and coming home in the twilight, passed a 
substantial -looking though very old farm-house, 
with comfortable barns and out-buildings, indicating 
a well-to-do householder. The rich bottom-lands, 
which stretched away a half-mile from the river to 
the hill - slopes, covered with abundant birch and 
maple, were luxuriant with grain and corn. 

That evening, when we were sitting in the libra- 
ry, after dinner, smoking and chatting, I asked the 
Judge, " To whom does that farm we passed on the 
level belong ?" 

The Judge is not and never was on the bench. 
Yet long as I had known him, and that was a long 
time, he had been called "Judge" by all the coun- 
try people, because it was an established fact of 
ancient date that he decided most of the disputes 
and differences, commercial and social, which arose 
in that part of the country. It is frequently the 
case, as here, that one man in a scattered community 
is the recognized adviser to whom people can go. 



HOW THE OLD LADY BEAT JOHN 123 

My old friend had inherited this position from his 
father, who had been to a former generation what 
the son now was to his neighbors. They came to 
him on all occasions when they needed counsel, and 
he did the work of a half-dozen lawyers. No one had 
died or could die comfortably and leave property 

unless his will had been drawn by "Judge " 

He had the perfect confidence of all. Living from 
youth up among them, known to be a man of ex- 
tended education, whose life was passed in study, 
but who was also a practical farmer of great skill 
and success, having large property, and always giv- 
ing his advice and services as a matter of friendship 
and neighborly kindness, and not for fee or reward, 
his position was one of commanding influence. His 
influence was commanding, too, for the reason that 
he almost never exerted it. He took no prominent 
part in politics; but in the old times there were very 
many voters in the town, and more in the county, 
who could give no other reason for their votes than 
this: that they voted as the Judge voted. 

I have said that he drew the wills for people who 
had property. This was no small generosity, for it 
involved much time and often great inconvenience. 
But the Judge was an essential part of the social 
structure in that town, and quietly performed what 
he regarded as the duty and pleasure of his posi- 
tion. 

When I asked him who was the owner of that 



124 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

farm he laughed outright, and, after a moment's pause, 
said, " I will tell you a story. 

"One stormy winter night, after midnight, I was 
sitting here reading, the rest of the family having 
gone to sleep long before, when old Dr. Strong 
thundered at the door-knocker, and made noise 
enough to wake the Seven Sleepers. It is a way 
he has, and neither my wife nor the girls, who were 
roused out of slumber, nor I myself, had any ques- 
tion who was at the door. I let him in myself, and 
a tempest of wind and snow with him. The blast 
that drove him into my arms also put out the hall 
lights, whirled into the library, and flared the read- 
ing-lamp so that it broke the chimney and blazed 
up to a colored tissue-paper affair which Susie had 
put over the shade, set it on fire, and for a moment 
threatened a general conflagration of papers and 
books on the table. 

"'Shut the door yourself!' I shouted, and rushed 
in here to put out the fire. That done, I went back 
and found the old doctor out of breath, in the dark, 
trying to shut the door against the wind. It took 
the strength of both of us to do it. Then I told 
him to find his way to the library, for he knew it, 
and I went off in search of another lamp. 

"When I came back he was just recovering his 
wind, and, after a gasp or two, told me his errand. 
'Old Mrs. Norton is dying. She can't live till 
morning. She's alive now only on stimulants. 



HOW THE OLD LADY BEAT JOHN 125 

She wants to make a will, and I have come for 
you.' 

"'A nice night,' I said, 'for a two-mile drive, to 
make a will for a woman who hasn't a cent in the 
world to leave. Why didn't you tell her so, and 
have done with it.' 

" 'Now look here,' said the doctor, 'this is a case 
of an old woman and old neighbor and friend, and 
she wants you to do something for her, and you'll 
do it, if it's only to comfort her last hours. Get 
your things and come with me. We shall not find 
her alive if you don't hurry, and you'll be sorry if 
that happens.' 

"The upshot of it was that I went. We had a 
fearful drive out to the farm-house on the flat, which 
you are asking about. Mrs. Norton was the widow 
of John Norton, who had died forty odd years be- 
fore this. John Norton when he married her was a 
widower with one son — John. He was a man of con- 
siderable property, and when he died left a widow, 
that son John by his first wife, and two sons by his 
second wife. The elder son, John, had never been 
on very warm terms with his step-mother, and for 
some years had had no intercourse with the family. 

" I found the old lady lying in the big room, on 
a great bedstead on one side of the room, opposite 
to the broad chimney, in which was a roaring fire, 
the only light in the room. After the doctor had 
spoken to her and administered something — a stim- 



126 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

ulant, I suppose — he came over to me and said in a 
whisper : ' Hurry up ; she's very weak.' 

"I had brought paper and pen and ink with me. 
I found a stand and a candle, placed them at the 
head of the bed, and, after saying a few words to 
her, told her I was ready to prepare the will, if she 
would now go on and tell me what she wanted to 
do. I wrote the introductory phrase rapidly, and, 
leaning over towards her, said: 'Now go on, Mrs. 
Norton.' Her voice was quite faint, and she seemed 
to speak with an effort. She said : ' First of all I 
want to give the farm to my sons Harry and James ; 
just put that down.' 'But,' said I, 'you can't do 
that, Mrs. Norton ; the farm isn't yours to give away.' 

"'The farm isn't mine?' she said, in a voice de- 
cidedly stronger than before. 

" ' No j the farm isn't yours. You have only a life 
interest in it.' 

" ' This farm, that I've run for goin' on forty-three 
year next spring, isn't mine to do what I please with 
it! Why not, Judge? I'd like to know what you 
mean P 

" ' Why, Mr. Norton, your husband, gave you a 
life estate in all his property, and on your death the 
farm goes to his son John, and your children get the 
village houses. I have explained that to you very 
often before.' 

"'And when I die John Norton is to have this 
house and farm, whether I will or no ?' 



HOW THE OLD LADY BEAT JOHN 127 

"' Just so. It will be his.' 

11 ' Then I ain't going to die !' said the old woman, 
in a clear and decidedly ringing and healthy voice. 
And, so saying, she threw her feet over the front of 
the bed, sat up, gathered a blanket and coverlet 
about her, straightened up her gaunt form, walked 
across the room, and sat down in a great chair be- 
fore the fire. 

" The doctor and I came home. That was fifteen 
years ago. The old lady's alive to-day. And she 
accomplished her intent. She beat John, after all. 
He died four years ago, in Boston, and I don't know 
what will he left. But whoever comes into the farm- 
house when she goes out, it will not be John. And 
since John's death the farm has been better kept, 
and everything about it is in vastly better condition 
for strangers than it would have been for John." 



XIII 

PHILISTIS 

We were sitting by the fire after breakfast. The 
dominie was thinking. I was turning over a pile 
of old newspapers and wondering why he had kept 
them. 

"That paper," said he, "I kept because it had a 
letter from Sicily, speaking of a beautiful coin of 
Philistis. It is engraved in Visconti. Did you ever 
see it ?" 

" See it, man ? Yes ; did I never show it to you ?" 

" Show what ?" 

" That coin of Philistis. I first saw it thirty years 
ago, fell in love with it as the most beautiful head 
produced by Greek art in die - cutting that I ever 
saw, and I never have parted with it. I know a 
woman who looks like that face of the Sicilian 
queen." 

So saying, I took the silver coin from its little 
envelope in my pocket-case, and handed it to him. 
Whoever has seen that silver tetradrachm knows the 
beauty of that head of Philistis. 

My friend was more silent than before. He held 



PHILISTIS 129 

the coin in his hand, and buried his gaze into it for 
some space of time. 

11 Yes, I thought so ; but the Greek engraver was 
far ahead of the modern who attempted a copy. 
He knew her, he loved her, if she was a queen. 
And this is she. I thought I knew her. Yes, it is 
she." 

11 You knew her too. Where did you know — " 

" Xo, no, my friend. It has been said that God 
never makes persons of different generations ex- 
actly alike. That is not true. There was one Phi- 
listis in old times. You knew another. I knew a 
third, and she might have been a resurrection in the 
body of this Sicilian woman. Come with me." 

The library opened out at its side to a little gate 
entering the church-yard, and he led me to a grave, 
by which he paused and said, " My Philistis is 
here." 

Then, leaning on the head-stone while I leaned 
on another, the smoke of our cigars ascending in 
the still October air, the sunshine glittering on 
maple-leaves that fell through the brilliant light, 
one by one, on graves around us, he talked. 

" She was born in that old house over yonder. 
When I met you in Jerusalem in 1856 she was a 
child of ten years old. When I came home and 
saw her again I thought she was the loveliest child 
for beauty of face and beauty of mind I had ever 
known. I have seen many since, and I think so 



130 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

still. She has lain here quietly enough for fifteen 
years. The first rest she ever had, after her girl- 
hood was over, she found here. 

"What a woman she was at nineteen ! Till then 
her life was sunny; after that it was all cloud and 
storm. What she looked like, judge by your coin. 
She had not much companionship here of her own 
grade of mind, but there were three or four daugh- 
ters of neighbors within the ten-mile stretch of my 
parish who went to school with her, and afterwards 
they begged me to give them lessons. And they 
grew up fond of reading and fond of art history, 
and their visits to New York and Albany were full 
of incident and opened their minds; and she went 
once to Europe for a year with her aunt, and once 
to Cuba and Mexico with her father. I don't ex- 
actly like that word * cultivated,' for she was far 
ahead of what you ordinarily mean by a cultivated 
woman. I can't tell you what a light she was to us 
in the old parsonage. My daughter was younger 
than she, and owes all she is to the rare example 
of perfect womanhood, self-trust, and self-respect 
which that dear girl showed her. 

" She had troubles beginning to surround her 
life when she was nineteen. You can judge of the 
courage with which she was likely to meet all the 
troubles of this world by what once happened 
under my own eyes. 

" You see over there across the valley, where the 



PHILISTIS 131 

river comes out of the glen? Jt runs deep and 
Strong through the ravine, and rushes out to the 
level land through a narrow gorge. We had gone 
out there to look for a rare fern. Botanizing was 
a favorite play for us. We were five or six. I 
with my horse and buckboard took one of the girls. 
She and the others were on horseback. It was in 
August. We had left the horses, and were searching 
up the banks of the river. I was standing on the 
ridge of rock, fifty feet above the river. She had 
gone below me up a narrow ledge along the stream, 
three or four feet above and close over the edge of 
the swift water. A few bushes clung there and lay 
out over the stream. Suddenly I heard a cry of 
horrible distress. I looked down to her instinc- 
tively. She was all right, but she too had heard it, 
and was looking up-stream. Then my eyes followed 
hers, and twenty rods above I saw a twelve -year- 
old boy on a rock gesticulating and yelling. In the 
river, rolling and plunging down the rapid, was a 
bundle of something, It turned out afterwards to 
be his little brother, who had rolled off the rock 
into the river. She told me afterwards she had 
seen them a moment before, and knew it was the 
child. 

" It took just about thirty seconds for that bun- 
dle of clothes to come swift as an arrow dow r n to 
us. Knowing the girl as well as I did, my only 
thought was that she would do something rash, 



132 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

and I looked at her steadily and wished for wings 
to drop myself down to her side. 

"Now I will tell you what I saw her do. I saw 
her measure with her eye the course of the current 
and the direction of the child's sweep. Then she 
measured the depth of the water at the foot of the 
ledge she was standing on, and, seeing bottom, not 
very deep, she sat down on the ledge and deliber- 
ately slid down, feet first, into the water, and stood 
up straight and firm, and seized the trunk-stem of 
a bush that lay out over the water. Then, without 
looking away from the child, she sent out a clear 
ringing call for help, that went over the rocks in 
spite of the river's noise. By this time I was half- 
way down the steep, and I answered her. The 
child was coming towards the upper side of the bush. 
I thought it was safe to strike there. So did she. 
But at the last moment a swirl sent the little one 
off shore, just into the end of the bush, and as it 
caught and swung once around there and was go- 
ing away to death, she threw herself quietly — I say 
quietly, for it was a graceful motion — forward on 
her face, plunged her right hand into the mass of 
branches and grasped them, while with her left she 
seized the clothes of the child. Her feet swung 
out down-stream, the water boiled over her shoul- 
ders and face, but she held on with both grasps, 
and the bush swayed down and in shore just in 
time for me to seize her and draw them both 



PHILISTIS 



133 



ashore. No, I didn't draw them ashore. She 
touched bottom with her feet, and when she felt 
my grasp on her clothes let go the bush, took my 
hand, and stood up in the water, and I got them 
both ashore somehow. 

kk That's the stuff some of our Northern women 
are made of. Gentle, lovable, full of all purity ; 
taught all graces by the beauty which surrounded 
her life ; unspotted of the world ; ah, my animadul- 
cis, no love of man ever stained thy sweet soul ! 

" I could have placed here the sad epitaph of 
Julia Alpinella : 

"'Hie jaceo, infelicis patris infelix proles ; exorare 
pat ris ncccm non potui ; male mori in fatis ille erat ; 
vixi annos xxiii.' " 

I did not ask nor did my friend relate to me any 
of the story which is summed up in that (perhaps 
fabulous) old epitaph of a servant of Diana, and of 
a modern New England girl. Was it not Byron, or 
who was it, that said it was the saddest story ever 
told on a memorial tablet ? 

When I went to my room that night I missed 
the coin. Next morning he said he had looked at it 
three times in the night, when he woke, restless 
from dreams, and — and — did I value it very much ? 
Would I let him show it to just two ladies, who 
knew and loved his Philistis? Yes, I would, and 
therefore he might keep it, but only till we meet 
again, for did not I too know a fair woman whose 



134 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

face was that of the queen of Hiero ? But his 
Philistis was dead, and mine lives yet; he loved his 
Philistis as his own child, and I but admired the 
one I knew as a beautiful woman. But then the 
more reason I should have it. For the living change, 
and as they change they imperceptibly efface our 
memories of what they were ; and so a thing of 
beauty is not a joy forever, unless it be like the 
silver stamp of the Greek gem-engraver's die. 

" But you, my friend, you remember that face ; 
you haven't forgotten it ?" 

" Never, never, but I want this. Get another 
for yourself. Leave this one here. Have a por- 
trait painted of your Philistis. Get a sculptor to do 
her in marble. She is no such woman as was our 
little one, the light of our eyes." 

Could I resist him ? Don't we all of us have 
that same feeling that those we have loved and 
lost were far more lovely than those any one else 
has loved and lost ? 



XIV 

A NORTHERN SLEIGH-RIDE 

When Christmas-time approaches, young people 
grow merry, and old people, if they are right-mind- 
ed, should grow calmly happy. We who have kept 
Christmas festivals for many years, so that we can 
count back one after another of them for a half- 
hundred and more, ought to have laid up a store 
of pleasant things to think about. If we have not 
done so it is time to begin. 

On Monday the snow fell nineteen inches deep, 
and all the country is white for the joyous festival. 
Christmas without snow is unknown to our memo- 
ries, who were brought up in the north country. 
Sitting before the fire a little while ago, there came 
into my thoughts a group of faces which were so 
full of bright, overflowing joy, and the beauty of 
youth and hope, that I am half convinced every 
one of them, wherever they are, in this or another 
world, has lighted up with memory of the same 
scene. 

It was in the Christmas holiday vacation. I 
was at home from college. I am not sure now 



136 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

whether in those days they gave us a Christmas 
vacation in Princeton, but I know that I went 
home. I remember getting up early in the cold 
winter morning, taking the stage, and dragging 
through deep mud to New Brunswick, where we, a 
lot of New York boys, took steamboat down the 
Raritan and up the bay to New York. The Phila- 
delphia Railroad was then running, with small, old- 
fashioned coaches for cars. But the railroad fares 
were high, and the students from New York knew 
how to save a dollar or two out of their allowances 
by taking stage and steamboat. I went up the 
Hudson, to my home above the Highlands, in an 
evening boat. The river had remained open that 
year much later than usual. Next day began the 
Christmas jollities ; but it is one evening's advent- 
ures which arrest my memories to-night. 

It was a brilliant, cold afternoon when Joe S ■ 

came to hunt me up and propose a sleigh-ride. 
There was to be a grand convention of some soci- 
ety that evening at a town fifteen miles up the river. 
It was always easier in those days for daughters to 
persuade their mothers to let them go on a sleigh- 
ride to a certain place and meeting than to go on 
a sleigh-ride pure and simple. And then, any great 
meeting — religious, moral, or sensational — was a 
far greater event than now in the rural districts. 

"But where can we get a team, Joe? 1 ' I said. 
" Our horses are gone off." 



A NORTHERN SLEIGH-RIDE 137 

u Your father's big sleigh hasn't gone ?" 

u No." 

"Then I'll tell you what I propose. Mr. Staun- 
ton is in New York. His sorrels haven't been out 
for a week. He lets you drive them. You get 
them. I'll bring around my father's bays and our 
farm harness. We'll hitch them to your big sleigh. 
It'll make a glorious team." 

" But who will drive them ? None of them were 
ever harnessed four-in-hand. If I'm going for a 
sleigh-ride with the girls, I'm not going to give all 
my time to tooling a new team like that, I can tell 
you." 

11 That's all fixed. Steve will be here in fifteen 
minutes with old Ccesar, and Caesar can drive any- 
thing that ever went in harness." 

Boys were boys then, and will be boys forever. I 
thank God devoutly that there are yet hours in 
which I know 7 that I am a boy; and always about 
Christmas-time the boy-spirit comes back and as- 
serts its omnipotence over care and responsibility 
and sorrow 7 and years. 

There was no thought in any of our young heads 
of the risk, the danger to the precious load we in- 
tended to take. The prospect of a glorious moon- 
light sleigh-ride, four boys, four girls, and any mar- 
ried couple we could get to go along (to do propri- 
ety), this shut out all thought except of how to get 
off. But there was a very doubtful point, in which, 



138 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

as I grew older — in fact, before I was four hours 
older — I became convinced my boy enthusiasm had 
led me to do wrong. I do not tell the story for 
boys' imitation. I cannot make a moral to the 
story by relating a catastrophe as the fitting punish- 
ment for our wrong-doing. All went off with su- 
perb success. But, my boys, if one of you read this, 
don't go and do so. It was only next door to horse- 
stealing. That is fact. For I knew that Joe's 
father would never trust that pair of bays in any 
hands but his own. They were splendid animals, 
and he and Mr. Staunton were forever matching 
one another with their favorite teams. I knew also 
that although Mr. Staunton had often trusted me 
with those powerful sorrels, he would not be very 
likely to let me or any one put them in a four-horse 
team, especially with those bays. However, I left 
Joe to settle his own conscience and bring the 
horses, while I went over to Mr. Staunton's stable, 
took the sorrels from his coachman, who thought it 
must be all right, and asked no questions. 

We had a time of it getting them into harness. 
Caesar was full of ecstasy over the prospect. The 
old colored man knew horses all by heart, and knew 
boys too. He understood the entire performance, 
and he wanted the fun as much as we, and suggested 
no difficulties ; but he looked to the harness with 
all his old eyes. Caesar had some confidence in 
me, boy though I was, and he whispered to me : 



A NORTHERN SLEIGH-RIDE 139 

"You're going to sit by me on the box-seat, Mr. 
W , ain't you ?" 

While the harnessing was going on I had gone 
into the house and asked my elder brother and his 
wife to go with us, and obtained their assent. Bet- 
ter company for such a ride no boys and girls on 
earth could have had. 

When all was ready, my brother came out and 
joined us. Joseph and Stephen and my brother 
piled into the sleigh. Caesar took the reins on the 
high front seat. I sat by him. The sun was just 
on the horizon. The flush of sunset was over the 
whole country, covered deep with two feet of snow 
on a level, and drifts six and ten feet high wherever 
the wind had eddied or dropped a light fleece. It 
was forty rods from our carriage - house to the 
street gate and the turn into the road. It was 
three-quarters of a mile up the road to the fork, 
then half a mile down the other road to the two 

houses, where we had sent Philip P to ask 

our four young friends to be ready. 

Two men who stood at the leaders' heads (the 
bays were on the lead) let go, and the team sprang 
forward. Then, for just a moment, the sorrels 
threatened to balk, and the off horse stood up and 
struck out his fore - feet at the bay leader. The 
nigh sorrel had intended to go all right, but at that 
he struck the dash-board with his iron heels, and 
stretched his head down and out as if he wanted 



140 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

to fight. The whole team was almost in a tangle 
for the instant, but the next they were straining 
steadily on the tugs, and we were going for the 
gate. 

" Sit down I" I shouted to my companions, who 
were all standing up and holding by the back of 
the box-seat and one another, watching the horses. 
They paid no heed. We went through the gate, 
and as we went through it I saw that Caesar hadn't 
force enough in his old left arm to swing that 
mighty team up the road. I seized the reins above 
his hands, and with all my strength, added to his, 
the horses yielded, the leaders plunging through the 
snow on the opposite side of the beaten track in 
the main road, the wheelers swinging in the track, 
the sleigh, like a stone in a sling, hurled around and 
rising on one runner, with the other high in the air. 
Do you know what a catapult is ? A sleigh swing- 
ing as that sleigh swung, and fetching up w r ith a 
sudden shock in the track, is a catapult. I did not 
know that Stephen had been shot into a snow- 
drift, for Caesar went away from my side like a dark 
shell from a mortar. Wide-awake Caesar! He 
didn't hold on to the reins. I was alone on the 
box, the broad straight road before me, and the 
horses going not quite so swift as the rays of the 
red sunset which shot right up the road. 

The beaten track was narrow, but the road was 
broad and level. It is generally an easy matter to 



\ N< >R rHERN SLEIGH-RIDE i \i 

stop a runaway team under such circumstances, 
and I followed the rule. The leaders yielded to a 
steady strain, and the wheelers followed them into 
the deep snow. A few rods of that was enough for 
them. They brought up, trembling and frightened 
at their own doings. A few kind words and 
touches did them good, while Stephen and Caesar 
overtook us, with sundry sleigh-robes that had gone 
out with them. When we reached the fork of the 
roads we had gotten up too much steam for a turn 
down the sharp angle, and went a mile farther, 
around a square, and back. By the time we came 
in front of the house of that dear old lady whose 
daughters we proposed first to pick up, the team 
was calm enough to stand without any of us at their 
heads. Fortunate that, for she never would have 
let the girls go if she had seen any of the events of 
the previous fifteen minutes. I see I have called 
her an old lady. That is another illustration of 
the ever-persistent boyhood in us. I should call 
one of her age a young lady now. She was the 
beautiful mother of two beautiful daughters, and 
the three were like three sisters in appearance. 

If one were to write out the memories of one such 
day and evening, as they crowd in on him when he 
deliberately invites them in, he could fill a vol- 
ume. 

Our company was made up, and the short twilight 
had changed into the white light of a winter moon, 



142 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

nearly full, when we were off for a fifteen-mile stretch, 
up hill and down, over a glassy road. 

Sleigh-riding by moonlight was, in our younger 
clays, the most exhilarating of all pleasures. It is 
difficult to explain why it was so. The social en- 
joyments of the young in winter — evening gather- 
ings, receptions, dancing-parties, balls— are more or 
less attractive to different dispositions. But I never 
knew one young person yet, in good health, who 
would not give up any ball or any conceivable social 
enjoyment for a sleigh-riding party by moonlight. 
And I think it fair to say that the underlying reason 
for this is in the innate love of the beautiful, the 
pure, the holy, which most, if not all, young people 
possess. No wealth of flowers, no lavish expendi- 
ture of art on the adornment of a ball-room, sur- 
rounds the young heart with such beauty and glory 
as the winter snow light, and in no life that art and 
wealth can create do pure young souls find their 
native atmosphere of purity, to which they were 
born, and in which alone they breathe freely. A 
moonlight night in a snow-covered country, if it be 
not nearer the light of heaven than any other earthly 
light, is at least more unearthly than any other, for 
in such illuminated nights we see only the glory and 
nothing of the vileness of this life. 

I cannot linger on that ride in these pages. You 
who never took a sleigh-ride would like to know 
how the time was passed as we flew like the wind 



A NORTHERN SLEIGH-RIDE 143 

along the road. Well, we were all a fairly educated 
lot of young people. There was a pretty steady rattle 
of talk and story and joke and riddles, and now and 
then a song. Was there any chance for a quiet talk — 
just one with one ? Obviously there was, for sleigh- 
bells on four swift horses fill the air with noise, and 
that makes confidential talk as easy as a balcony, 
or a conservatory, or any such place of escape from 
a ball-room. Did I enjoy it, up there on the box- 
seat with old Caesar? Bless your soul, my dear 
young lady, I didn't sit next to Caesar after we 
started. There was some one between us with a 
lovely face! such eyes! such hair! such a little pair 
of hands ! little even in their fur gloves. And those 
little hands were constantly aching to get hold of 
those reins ; and once, when the team came down 
to a walk half-way up a hill, Caesar let them hold the 
hurricane till we reached the top. All that winter 
I wrote poetry about those same eyes and that face 
and those hands, and I could have referred you to 
the poetry in print, if the editors of the Nassau 
Monthly had not refused to recognize its value. 

I must hurry on. We drove to the hotel in the 
large village, ordered supper, and, to make a proper 
report to the mothers at home, went for ten minutes 
to the meeting. I wish I could remember what it 
was about. I don't ; and I don't think I knew then, 
though it was in a large church, and we found a large 
audience. 



144 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

But I do know and have never forgotten that 
when we had been standing five minutes behind the 
back pews near the doors, where many were standing, 
and we were looking over the heads of the people 
at some one who was firing away on a platform in 
front of the pulpit, I felt a hand on my shoulder, and, 
looking around, met the eyes of my father's friend, 
Mr. Staunton, owner of the sorrel horses. 

For an instant I was — well, there is no word to 
explain the exact sensation. If one were writing a 
French novel he would say he nearly fainted, he 
was " bouleversed," he was — any exaggeration you 
please. But this is plain fact, and the fact is that 
American boys in those days were never much taken 
aback by the unexpected, which was then, as now, 
always happening. What came nearer to causing a 
violation of the proprieties of a meeting in a church 
by a shout of laughter was the pressure on my wrist 
of one of those little hands, now ungloved, and the 
despairing countenances of the whole party. It was 
lucky that they were all near enough together to see 
and hear what passed. In a low voice Mr. Staunton 
said : 

" I'm glad to see you. I came up in the boat 
from New York, and instead of stopping at home I 
thought I would come on up to the meeting, on the 
chance of finding some one here and getting a ride 
home. How did you come here? Can you take 
me down ?" 



A NORTHERN SLEIGH-RIDE 145 

"Oh yes, certainly; just as well as not; we've 
got a big sleigh and four horses ; come to the hotel 
after the meeting. We're going there now for sup- 
per." 

He went up the aisle. He was a delegate, or a 
director, or something or other. He was a grand 
good man, and we young people all were very fond 
of him. We went out. What fun we had at supper, 
and what a burst of merriment would come once in 
a while as we arranged for taking our good friend 
Mr. Staunton home behind his own horses "unbe- 
knownst " to him ! But we solemnly pledged our- 
selves to each other that if we succeeded, we would 
never whisper the story to any human being so long 
as he lived. And we did it, and we kept the pledge. 
He lived to a good old age and died only three 
years ago, and last summer at Lonesome Lake I 
told the story for the first time to his nephew. 

The horses came to the hotel door. The girls 
surrounded him, and talked and hustled him into 
the sleigh first of all, because he was our invited 
guest and must be best cared for. That was the 
moment of chief danger, for he was a lover of horses, 
and had a way of walking around and looking at a 
team. That team was worth looking at ! I changed 
seats with Caesar. There was no telling what might 
happen, and the way to be ready for the unexpected 
is to expect everything. 

The team was fresh now, and the moon was as 



T46 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

bright as ever. I had almost forgotten the over- 
hanging trouble as the sleigh swept along the white 
track behind those magnificent animals. Suddenly 
there was silence behind me where had been a 
babel of voices. They were appalled, and saw no 
way to avoid what seemed to be an inevitable rev- 
elation. "Why didn't you pull his feet out from 
under him and tumble over him, and get up a gen- 
eral scrimmage/' I afterwards asked Joe. " I was 
too scared to think of anything when I saw him 
stand up and take hold of the box-seat and look 
at those horses," frankly confessed my poor Joe. 
The next moment I heard a voice close to my ear. 

" I didn't think there was a pair of horses in the 
country that could step so like my sorrels. Whose 
are they, W ?" 

Before the words were out the loose white snow 
at the road-side was flying from the heels of the 
leaders, over the sorrels, into his face, over the 
sleigh ; the trot was broken into a short, plunging 
gallop, the right runner, off the track, was ploughing 
deep in the unbeaten white, and most of the people 
in that sleigh were expecting an upset. Two of 
them, on the front seat, expected no such thing, 
for out of a sable fur hood at my left came a quick 
cry, and, " Oh, Mr. Staunton, do sit down, you nearly 
threw me out ; make him sit down." 

And down he went, into all their arms, for Joe 
had come to his senses by this time. Then they all 



A NORTHERN SLEIGH-RIDE 147 

made much of him for an hour, and got him to tell- 
ing stories, and all went bravely on till we ap- 
proached home. 

"We'll drop you at the corner, Mr. Staunton; 
stand ready to jump." And out he went; the horses 
came down to a slow gait without stopping ; and 
among those trees in that light he couldn't tell a 
sorrel from an iron-gray, as we rushed away to the 
village. 

There were no bells about those horses when 
about three o'clock in the morning I led them my- 
self into their stable. I woke the coachman, who 
slept in the carriage-house, and enjoined on him 
perpetual silence, sealed with silver, more — much 
more— than I had saved by coming from Princeton 
to New York in the stage and steamboat. 

Yes, boys ; that's the only thing in this story 
worth your remembering. Doing wrong mostly 
must be paid for ; and a dime in those days, to a 
country boy, was bigger than a dollar is now. But 
what a night that was ! The moon has grown much 
paler since those times. This is a true story. Wit- 
ness my hand. 



XV 

LIFE SEEN THROUGH A WINDOW 

There was nothing remarkable about the appear- 
ance of the house. It was old and weather-colored ; 
that is, having been built of wood and never paint- 
ed, a gray-brown tint had come over all the wood, 
perhaps fifty years ago, and remained unchanged. 
For if any boards had at any time been removed, 
those replacing them had soon taken the same tint. 
It was but one story high, and there were four rooms 
on the floor. A very ancient block-house, the orig- 
inal home of the family, adjoined it, and was still 
useful, part of it as the dairy and part as the wood- 
shed. 

There were old trees a little way from the house, 
but none shaded it. On each side of the door, which 
was in the middle of the long side, and fronted the 
road, was a group of bushes, I am not sure what. 
They partly shaded the broad stone door-step, and 
also shaded the windows nearest the door on each 
side. It was through one of these that I caught 
sight of her face. The glass was that queer old 
twisted, uneven, shining, and iridescent glass that 



LIFE SEEN THROUGH A WINDOW 149 

one never sees nowadays, but which was the only 
kind used in country-houses in old times. It had 
its smooth, transparent spots, and the occupants of 
houses, especially the young people, always learned 
the exact location of those available spots, and went 
straight to them to look out, unless they were con- 
tent with distorted views of nature. 

Many times, driving by, I had seen that face 
through that same window, and at length it hap- 
pened that I had occasion to see the man of the 
house on some business about a horse, and so it 
came that one day when I asked him a question 
about the neighborhood, he said, " My mother could 
tell that \ you never saw her ; come in and see her." 
And so I went into the room on the south side, and 
saw the face without the intervening glass. It was 
a face of wonderful beauty. She was a very old 
lady, and for almost or quite fifty years had been an 
invalid, unable to walk, moved daily from her bed 
in the adjoining room to her chair by that window, 
and removed at night to her bed again. Her mind 
was clear and active, her body sadly ill and suffer- 
ing. She had never been out of those rooms for 
half a century. The world seen through one win- 
dow for fifty years might well have a peculiar aspect. 
And as I often afterwards stopped to see and talk 
with her, I had some curiosity to know what this as- 
pect was to her vision. 

If you imagine that she had seen but little of it 



150 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

you are mistaken. The experiences of life which 
make up what we call " the world " are more varied 
perhaps in great cities, but the impressions they' 
make are deeper in the country. And through that 
window she had seen very much, and what she had 
seen had entered into her soul. I cannot enumer- 
ate them — not a tenth or a hundredth part of the 
things she saw. I need not speak of the recurrence 
of the seasons, the coming of springs on meadows 
and hills, and the white coverings of winters, the 
growth of great trees from young saplings, the com- 
ing into the fields and along the fences and walls 
of new r foliage and new flowers, the successive crops 
on the lowlands across the road, and the generations 
of cattle and sheep that grazed in the pastures. 
All these she knew, and as her children were living 
and dutiful they had always taken care that she saw 
all that it was possible she could see. Though 
her eyes had never seen the new barns and stock- 
sheds to the north of the house, every horse and ox 
and cow and calf, I think every lamb on the farm, 
had been shown to her through that window-pane. 
One day while I sat with her I saw the collie dog 
look up and smile at her through the glass, and she 
nodded to him, and he went on satisfied. 

She was a widow when sickness first seized on 
her, and was ill very long before she could be 
brought out to the window. The first sight she saw 
there was the funeral of her father, and that scene 



LIFE SEEN THROUGH A WINDOW 151 

she remembered vividly as the beginning of her 
views of life through the window. His neighbors 
carried him out of the door and clown the walk to 
the gate, and laid him in the old box-wagon, and 
took him away. After that many of the beloved 
things of the world passed out of her view just there. 
She had four sons, and one of them she saw carried 
away just so. Her daughter's wedding made gay 
the green in front of the house. One by one, in 
after-years, she saw grandchildren come in at the 
gate, first babies brought in arms, then toddling 
children, glad to come to see her, then romping 
boys, never rough or rude in her presence, then stout 
young men, vigorous and full of life, and graceful 
girls, and every one of them most loving and tender 
to her. There was never one of them who did not 
enjoy sitting on the footstool by her side and talking 
to her, and telling her all their hearts' delights and 
anxieties. Somehow that room was a safe treasury 
for the deposit of young folks' secrets, and what was 
placed there was safe and never stolen or betrayed. 
Her youngest son, years ago, she saw turn back at 
the gate and wave his hand to her as he went away, 
and again and again at intervals of years she saw 
him coining in, each time bringing new honors that 
he had won, and him too she saw at last brought in 
by other hands to rest a little in the old home, and 
taken out again through the gate whither she had 
seen many that she loved go and many carried. 



152 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

If the effect of such views of life be always the 
same it would be well for all of us to spend our 
lives behind the old-fashioned panes of window- 
glass. There was no distortion in the vision of my 
good old friend. Cheery and always bright, she had 
a clear judgment of persons, sound appreciation 
of character, abundant content, and her life had 
been, she said, and she proved it by her visible life, 
full of enjoyment. She always saw the bright side. 
Even the deepest afflictions, added to her one con- 
stant affliction, failed to destroy that ineffable calm 
and peace of mind in which she lived. Books she 
had read in great number, but mostly she read her 
Bible, and the visions she had through her window, 
whether of joy or grief, were alike interpreted to her 
and commented on by the philosophy which is above 
all human reason. 

Hers had been a life worth living. We who think 
we see things through no clouds or mist or refract- 
ing medium, are far from seeing as clearly as did 
she. In all the country around she was a centre of 
good and benevolent influences. She knew all the 
people, young and old. So that when she at last 
went away the whole country mourned. She died 
in the late summer. 

The ending was very pleasant. For a little she 
became a child again — not childish, but just a little 
child ; so, at least, it seemed to those who cared 
for her. 



LIFE SEEN THROUGH A WINDOW 153 

She was sitting just there in the morning of a 
warm clay. She had been very silent that morning ; 
at least, so her grandson told me afterwards, but it 
may have been only an imagination. She was 
never talkative, and, unlike some old persons, she 
was wont to listen and smile her reply instead of 
speaking. So when a child of three years old, 
playing on the grass before the house, looked up 
into her face, and, holding up a bunch of flowers, 
shouted something to her, she only smiled and said 
nothing. Then the child repeated her question in 
a child's dictatorial way, and now the smile was 
very sweet that stole over the thin white features, 
and at the same time a far-away gaze was seen in 
her eyes. I say " was seen," for her grandson, a 
man of forty, coming in at the gate just then, was 
so struck by that gaze that he turned around and 
looked up the bend of the valley road, thinking she 
saw persons coming, and was trying to recognize 
them at a distance. 

" There is no one on the road that I can see, 
grandmother," he said as he entered the door and 
turned into her room. 

But there was some one on the road up which she 
was looking, with her face close to the pane of glass. 

Not to eyes purely human is it given to see those 
who travel that road ; but many times the aged, 
sometimes the young, are permitted for a while, be- 
fore the silver cord is quite loosened, to look with 



154 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

superhuman vision along the road which the angels 
and spirits of the just use in going to and fro be- 
tween this and their country. How many of them 
she saw no one knows, but that she saw two at 
least cannot be doubtful. For just now her grand- 
son approached her chair and heard her voice. 
She was murmuring to herself, and over and over 
again, smiling all the time, she was saying, " Joshua, 
Joshua, Susy, Susy." 

Not far away from the farm there is an old 
graveyard, in which is a brown stone with two 
half- circle elevations on the top, and that one 
stone tells of the death of Joshua and Susan, twin 
children, in the year 1787. They were her brother 
and sister, a little older than she. When she was 
three years old they died at six. It is not likely 
that on this earth there was any other human be- 
ing remaining whom those children had known and 
loved, or who had known and loved them. Had 
they waited all these long years for the coming of 
their baby sister ? As they waited and watched, 
did she seem to them, from year to year, to grow 
older and less fair and beautiful than they had left 
her in the freshness of infancy? Were they ever 
weary of waiting ? Do they keep count of days and 
years in the country whose light is perpetual and 
unchanging ? Was she always a child to them 
grown strong in the atmosphere of Paradise ? 

Doubtless she, who alone of all the living could 



LIFE SEEN THROUGH A WINDOW 155 

have memory of those names thus coupled together 
in tones of affection, saw them on the road along 
which her mysterious vision was directed. After 
that she seemed to see no earthly scenes ; and when 
they carried her out of the sunshine the smile did 
not leave her face, or if for a brief time it was not 
there, it came again with great beauty. She did 
not speak again. All that day she lay calm and 
quiet, and her company was evidently of the other 
sort of people, of whom we, so long as we are 
wholly human, know little and can imagine little. 
The evening drew on. The birds sang in the maples 
until the cry of the nighthawk alone was heard in 
the twilight. Then over on the hill-side whippoor- 
wills called mournfully to one another as the night 
went along. At midnight her grandson, the clergy- 
man, arrived from his distant home. He looked 
for a little while at her beautiful face, spoke but 
received no reply, then knelt by the bed and re- 
peated the words of the Lord's Prayer. He did 
not use the blundering form of the new revision, 
but the old phrases with which for so long time she 
had been familiar. As the sound reached her ears 
— that sound which seemed to be in the language 
of the other country, which Joshua and Susy under- 
stood, and in which they joined — her lips moved 
as if syllabling the words, but no sound came from 
them : nor after that. 



XVI 

COLORED PEOPLE 

Intelligent minds are seeking with great sin- 
cerity the solution of the problem : What is to be 
the future of the colored race in our country ? And 
many are seeking it in great blindness. The gov- 
erning white race in the Northern States are in 
general as ignorant of the character, the qualities, 
the abilities and disabilities of the colored race as 
they are of the character of the Afghans. 

I am not speaking now of how little Northern 
men know about the colored race in the Southern 
States. I refer to the knowledge which whites in 
New England, New York, and elsewhere have of 
the colored people in their own states and towns 
and villages. 

Political excitement and the wiles of politicians 
for the past forty years have kept the Southern 
colored man in sight so constantly that the North- 
ern colored man has sunk out of sight. That kind 
of philanthropy which many delight in, forming 
societies, making speeches, collecting other people's 
money to spend, has found ample field in distant 



COLORED PEOPLE 1 57 

parts of the country, and the charity which ought 
to begin at home has not had its beginning. 

There is more need to-day of Northern people 
recognizing the condition of the Northern colored 
man than of bothering about the Southern colored 
man. The colored race in the North is more neg- 
lected by Northerners, more isolated, set apart by 
the dominant sentiment of the whites than the col- 
ored race at the South by white Southerners. 

The relations between the two races at the South 
are more Christian, more favorable to the elevation 
of the colored man, than at the North. 

These are strong statements, but I write them 
deliberately and with knowledge. I could fill 
volumes with what I am confident would interest 
some readers, records of my personal acquaintance 
with Northern colored people, their homes, their 
employments and enjoyments, their social gather- 
ings, their mutual benefit efforts, literary and other 
clubs and societies, their marriages, their funer- 
als, and especially their religious associations in 
churches. It is pitiable beyond expression to see 
how utterly alone and unaided they are. 

The colored people of the Northern States are, in 
fact, more " looked down on " by Northern whites 
than are the Southern freemen by Southern whites. 
This is no sweeping statement that I make without 
observation. Look around you, my friend, wher- 
ever you live, and consider the subject. What do 



158 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

you do for colored people ? What is your mental 
method of regarding them ? What do you know 
about the race in your city ? Did you ever try to 
help them in any of their efforts to help them- 
selves ? 

There are good people at the North who are liv- 
ing in complete self-satisfaction that with the aboli- 
tion of slavery in the South they have done a glori- 
ous work, and all that they need do for the colored 
race in all the states, North and South. And all the 
time, at their doors, close around them, the race is 
living, a dependent people, unaided, uncared for, 
disregarded. There is plenty of work for the phi- 
lanthropy of the North among Northern colored 
people. 

The struggle of the colored people of the North 
for their own improvement and general advance is 
one of the deepest interest, full of pathos, because 
so patient and so unaided. Brought up in my baby- 
hood and childhood by the hands of colored people, 
watched in my boyhood and youth by dark faces 
that I loved as well as any white faces, I have all 
my life been closely attached to many colored folk. 
How many Northerners who read this were ever at 
the wedding of a colored young man and woman, 
the baptism of a colored child, a social gathering of 
colored people, a meeting of a literary society of 
colored young men? How many of you ever cheered 
a respectable colored family by a friendly call — not 



COLORED PEOFLE 159 

a visit of patronage, but one of good-will and neigh- 
borliness? How many of you ever went, where all 
are free to go, to the funeral of a colored person ? 
Do you say you were never invited on any such 
occasions? Why not? Did you ever give indica- 
tion that you would accept an invitation ? Would 
you go, if invited, except as a matter of curiosity ? 
Those people, as a class throughout the North, live 
always conscious that you don't want their invita- 
tions, that you don't purpose to associate with them 
on any terms of any kind which may imply equality. 
Equality ! The word is one of the humbugs of our 
age. It is the name of an imagination, a condition 
that has no existence in social and community life. 
In many a group of white men and women in society 
there are some (and you know them when you meet 
them) who are fitter for the State Prison than for 
your companionship ; some who are immeasurably 
below others in moral, intellectual, physical, and 
other considerations. You are not going to make 
people your equals, black or white, by treating them 
as your " neighbors " in the highest authoritative 
sense of that word. 

Legislation about hotels and railways will never 
produce equality. That will always be an individual 
question, dependent on influences far above the reach 
of law. You can no more legislate a man into society 
which rejects him than you can legislate railway and 
stock swindlers out of society which accepts them. 



160 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

Don't imagine me seeking to abolish distinctions 
of the races, and bring about even apparent equal- 
ity. I don't believe in it, don't want it, don't be- 
lieve all the philanthropy on earth will or ought to 
accomplish it. Educated in the Westminster Cat- 
echism, I would have all men taught their duties in 
'their several places and relations as "superiors, in- 
feriors, and equals" — places and relations which 
will exist for all eternity, here and hereafter ; with- 
out which the world would stagnate on a dead level 
of imbecility. But the superior owes duties of kind- 
ness, assistance, protection, education, sympathy, 
love to the inferior. 

Yes, that is the word, love. I know — or I should 
say I have known, for all of them have gone to God 
and rank now as he ranks his chosen, in various 
lustre — I have known black men whom I loved, 
to whose lives of faithfulness, in their humble sta- 
tions, I look back with affection, to whose graves my 
thoughts go, in wakeful night-times, as they often go 
to the graves of the beloved dead. 

It was but a short time ago that one of them 
died. He was a servant, but more than a servant, 
steward of the entire household, of family interests, 
and a large part of the financial affairs, trusted and 
faithful, respected, honored — I use the word again — 
loved, by the old, by the children, by every one. 
The house was in one of our most wealthy cities. 
Few men in the city were more widely known or 



COLORED PEOPLE l6l 

respected by the community, rich and poor. His 
fine form, his speaking countenance, his intelligent 
eye, all made him a man of mark. He was a gen- 
tleman in every sense of the word — in manner, habit, 
kindliness to those whom he could help, and he 
helped many in higher stations than his own. His 
intellectual ability and his intelligence were above 
those of the average of the people of the city. He 
was honored and trusted by the colored population. 
He was a free giver according to his small ability in 
charities and in his church, in which he held the 
most responsible position as a layman. 

I have no space to dwell on the beauty of his 
character, which made us all love him. He was a 
child in his simplicity of faith, while he was a man 
in his unbending integrity. We never thought of 
the household as existing without him. When he 
was struck down by sudden illness, we had a reve- 
lation of the social conditions of the colored people 
in the city which astonished us. He was a member 
of a society. From the moment of his attack his 
associates devoted themselves to him, and when 
they found that everything possible was done for 
him as a member of the family, they detailed, day 
and night, three men to be ready for any emergency. 
Night after night I walked through the house and 
saw in the gloom those three dark forms and faces, 
motionless, only the eyes asking me if anything 
were wanted. They offered to detail a man to sup- 



162 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

ply as far as possible his place as butler, this be- 
ing a part of their system whereby to save one of 
their number from losing employment by sickness. 
At the same time a similar association of colored 
women, of which his wife was a member, detailed 
women to attend on and help the wife and care for 
the young children of the sick man, all of whom were 
members of the household. No wealthy white man 
in the land can, with all his money, command such 
unremitting devoted attention in his last illness as 
the colored men and women thus gave to one of 
their number. There was no moment in all the 
weeks of his sickness that there w r ere not several 
men and women within call to supplement the at- 
tentions we gave him. 

There have been sad mornings in that old house, 
when the daylight has come in on the dead faces of 
those of the family who have gone, but scarcely one 
more sad than that morning when his dark face was 
set, irresponsive for the first time. 

His funeral was appointed for the third day after, 
and the daily papers gave notice of the hour at 
which would be buried, as the notice said, this 
"faithful steward and friend." His coffin stood in 
the very spot where had stood the coffin of the old 
father whose years of age and feebleness he had 
tended to their close ; where had stood the coffin of 
the mother, whose saintly memory hallows the old 
house under the trees she loved ; where each coffin 



COLORED PEOPLE 163 

of each of our dead in the old home had stood. 
He was a lover of flowers, and abundant bloom was 
around him. At the appointed hour the house be- 
gan to fill. Every room, hall, staircase was crowded 
with an assembly of people, come there to honor a 
dead man worthy of all honor. His favorite hymn 
was sung with exquisite melody of voices. So, all 
the care and tenderness that we could bestow on 
our dead fathers or brothers we bestowed on him, 
for he was one of us. 

But in the crowded assembly which came to honor 
the dead there were only two white men and four 
white ladies. Nor was this matter of surprise. It is 
not a special characteristic, so far as I know, of any 
one part of the North, that the color line should be 
drawn thus sharply. It is thus drawn everywhere. 
I have attended many funerals of colored persons, 
and in most cases have been the only white person 
present. 

Writing about colored people reminds me of an 
old couple, who were once well known to many 
readers of this, and who have for some years past 
been citizens of another country, where they are 
happily settled. For there is a better country than 
this of ours, howsoever we may boast of our institu- 
tions. 

The Church of the Transfiguration in New York 
is widely known by a name given it long since — 
"The Little Church Around the Corner." This 



164 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

was never a properly descriptive name, for it is not 
a little church. It seats nearly a thousand people, 
and is generally full. But the low ceiling, the wan- 
dering shape of the floor, the quiet and warm tone 
of the decoration, the paintings hanging low on the 
walls, and the numerous memorial windows, many 
of which are to children of the parish, give it a 
more compact and home-like appearance than some 
other churches, and lead strangers to underesti- 
mate its size. The members of the Transfigura- 
tion parish, old and young, are warmly attached to 
their church, and it is unnecessary to add that 
they are still more warmly held in bonds of very 
tender affection and respect to the rector, who is 
their father and friend. The church was founded 
by him and has always been under his guidance. 
It is a working church, reaching in its charities 
and ministrations all classes and colors of people. 
The record of these works is not to be published 
here. It is kept in a book elsewhere. Not the 
least interesting and important part of the work is 
among the colored people of New York, many of 
whom are members of the parish. 

Old members of the parish remember George 
and Elizabeth Wilson, who for a long period were 
door-keepers and pew-openers in the church. Wil- 
son was a tall colored man with gray hair and 
beard, a wrinkled forehead over a pair of fine eyes, 
a stoop in his back, and sometimes a halt in his 



COLORED PEOPLE 165 

step. For he was a rheumatic old man, quite 
feeble, never fit for hard work, and therefore a pen- 
sioner on the charities of the church. He did a 
little work, with his wife, in and about the church, 
which is, on week-days as on Sundays, always open 
for any one who may seek a place of rest and 
prayer. Elizabeth was not much better in health 
and strength than Wilson, but she was more active, 
and regarded the church as her special possession 
and care, for which she was responsible to the rec- 
tor and to God. Wilson had been a slave in his 
younger days. Elizabeth was born free. At almost 
any time of any day you would be sure to find the 
two, moving slowly about the church, dusting here, 
cleaning there, arranging this or that ; or perhaps 
sitting, silent, as if at home. They knew every 
member of the parish by sight, and on Sundays, 
standing at the transept door, recognized instantly 
any stranger, and showed him or her to a seat. 
They were a loving couple, closely attached to one 
another ; devout and humble in life and conversa- 
tion, much loved by all the parish. They had be- 
come, I might almost say, a part of the church dec- 
oration, for their forms made a feature of no little 
beauty in the home-like church. Their faces always 
greeted incomers with a smile of welcome, and 
when first one and then the other was missed there 
was a vacancy to which it took long to become ac- 
customed. 



166 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

They grew old under the care and in the service of 
the Transfiguration parish. Elizabeth was the first 
to go. There were some very touching, very thrill 
ing occurrences in the room where she lay dying. 
None was more so than what old Wilson said to her 
just before she died. The last blessing had been 
given, the passing soul committed " into thy hands, 
O Lord." The rector and Wilson were kneeling 
side by side. The old man, silently w r eeping, held 
his old wife's hand. She was restless, and moved 
her head uneasily. Still holding her hand in one 
of his, he reached out the other, gently passing it 
over her forehead as if he would smooth the wrin- 
kles, and said, " Never mind, never mind, Bessie 
darling, you'll soon be washed all white." No 
one had ever before these days heard him call her 
any name but Elizabeth. No one had ever before 
heard from him any suggestion that he desired to 
be of any other color. His heart now spoke out its 
hidden emotions, of love and longing, when he let 
his old companion go before him to the land of rest 
from labor, and of rank and station according to 
the will of the Master and King, in whom he had 
perfect trust. 

He did not wait long behind her. He was very 
lonesome. He wandered in a vacant way around 
the church. He sat a great deal in silent thought 
there and at home. No one knows how lonesome 
life can be to a poor, old, rheumatic colored man, 



COLORED PEOPLE 167 

whose only companion of forty years has died. But 
he looked into the other world now with new 
thoughts and new desires. Elizabeth was there, 
waiting for him, white of countenance and pure of 
soul. Poverty and lowliness in this world compel 
miserable surroundings and associations with vice 
and sin and shame. The joys of paradise are not 
so entrancing to the vision of those who in this 
world live among the delights of life and the exter- 
nal refinements of society. The poor and lowly in 
New York cannot keep clear of the abominable sur- 
roundings of poverty; and to those poor who are 
pure in heart, as were Wilson and Elizabeth, the 
sight of the beautiful country over yonder is full of 
joy and refreshment and hope, even before they 
enter it. 

At least once a week, sometimes oftener, he came 
to see us, and to talk about Elizabeth. Many vis- 
itors have been in my library, many dear friends, 
who have gone away forever. None of them have 
left here more enduring memory than he. He was 
a child philosopher, a child theologian. He told us 
what he thought, not as beliefs, not as opinions, but 
as ideas that had come to him when he sat alone 
thinking of this and the other life, and commenting 
to himself on the words of revelation. Wonderful- 
ly clear, marvellously penetrating are the wisdom 
and comment which come sometimes from such 
simple, thoughtful minds. He never knew he was 



168 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

talking theology or any other ology. He only re- 
vealed, with the simplicity of a child, the workings 
of a mind which had one great foundation princi- 
ple of thought and reason — faith in a Saviour of 
men. 

Wilson was a sensible man, without any imagi- 
nation. Therefore we noted as more interesting 
and remarkable an occurrence which he related 
one morning, in my library, to one of the ladies 
who had been with Elizabeth in her last hours. 

" I saw Elizabeth last night," he said. 

" You dreamed about her, did you ?" said the 
lady. 

" No, ma'am, it wasn't any dream. I was awake, 
and she was in the room, and I saw her as plain as 
I see you." Being questioned, he described the 
vision. He always spoke slowly, and with choice 
of his words. 

" It was all dark in the room, and I was lying 
awake thinking about her, and saying to myself, 
1 She is happy and comfortable ;' and I looked up 
and she was standing by the side of the bed, look- 
ing just like she used to look a good many years 
ago when she was well and strong." 

" Was she dressed in white ?" 

"No, ma'am, she had a kind of a mouse-colored 
cloak on, something like what ladies wear when it 
rains." 

" And you were awake ?" 



COLORED PEOPLE 169 

"Just as awake as I am now, ma'am, and I had 
my eyes wide open. 7 ' 

" Did she speak to you ?" 

11 No, ma'am ; you see I was surprised, for it was 
dark, and I couldn't see nothing else ; but I could 
see her just as plain as if it was light; and she 
stood still, and just kind o' smiled; but she didn't 
speak ; no, she -didn't say anything. She was light- 
ed up, somehow, so I could see her. I was going 
to speak to her, but before I could get myself 
straight to say anything, she wasn't there, and I 
didn't see her any more." 

Wilson had told his vision to some one that 
morning who had tried to persuade him that it 
was his imagination — a pure delusion. Not so we. 
Why should he not believe he had seen her? What 
harm in believing that God had sent her to com- 
fort him in his lonesome old age ? Who dare af- 
firm it was not so ? We encouraged him to believe 
it. Soon after that he saw her, and knew whether 
his night vision had been delusion or reality. 

Both he and she died in the faith. The rector 
was with them to the last. One after the other was 
brought into the church, laid before the altar where 
they had worshipped with us, carried thence to the 
church cemetery, and committed to the earth until 
the resurrection. 

Often and often I see visions of them, almost as 
plainly as Wilson saw Elizabeth. I see them w r hen 



170 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

I go down the transept, standing at the door as in 
old time. I think many of us who worship in the 
Church of the Transfiguration will be glad when 
we see them in the eternal temple, whose door and 
door-keeper is their and our Lord. 

When you are passing through Twenty -ninth 
Street, turn into the church-yard, which with its shad- 
owy trees, its fountain, and flowers and birds, sepa- 
rates the church from the street. Enter the church. 
It is always open ; many weary men and women 
rejoice to find it so. On the right-hand side of the 
transept door, and also on the right-hand side of 
the baptistery, observe, as you enter, a stained-glass 
window. Perhaps this is the only window in any 
church in the world which is a memorial of a 
colored person. It was placed where it is, be- 
cause that is the door which for years the old man 
and old woman — Wilson and Elizabeth — used to 
attend. The painting in the window represents the 
baptism of the Ethiopian by St. Philip. This is the 
inscription : " In Memory of George B. and Eliz- 
abeth Wilson, sometime door-keepers in this house of 
the Lord, Ps. lxxxiv. 10." The reference is to 
these words : " For a day in thy courts is better 
than a thousand. I had rather be a door-keeper in 
the house of my God than to dwell in the tents of 
wickedness." They are not door-keepers now. No 
servant or apostle, not Peter for all his keys in 
symbolic art, keeps that door. For the King is 



COLORED PEOPLE l 7 I 

himself the door, and no Peter keeps Him. Con- 
tent, humble, and faithful as door-keepers in the 
church here, they walk now with kings and priests 
in the peace that is unbroken, the safe citizenship 
which is beyond all revolutions. 



XVII 

EXAMPLE 

It was after sunset one evening, a long time ago. 
The road was good, and I had only four miles to 
drive. My horses were tired, for I had come a 
long way since noon and the sun had been hot. 
There was a sharp turn of the road to the left. At 
this point a new stretch of road diverged from the 
old road and joined it again two miles beyond. 
This two miles of the old road was a very bad road, 
and some twelve years ago the new road was laid 
out, over better ground. The old road was defi- 
nitely abandoned, and at each end of it a lot of 
brush was piled across it as a barrier, so that stran- 
gers should not mistake it. In the course of years 
the brush heaps had decayed and disappeared, but 
the entrances to the old road had grown up with 
golden-rod and aster, so that there was no sem- 
blance of a roadway. That two miles of the old 
road was always a favorite drive for me. It was 
all in the forest, and was all very nearly level. In 
fact it was a bad road, because it was so level that 
the water did not drain away from it, and teams 



EXAMPLE 173 

cut it up, and there were mud holes, and occasion- 
al projecting tops of rocks and uncovered roots of 
trees. 

My reason for preferring a buckboard to any oth- 
er wagon for ordinary use in the country is that it 
will stand rough work over unbroken ground. You 
can turn into the open fields or forests, and drive 
over rocks and logs if you drive with care, and 
your horses are trustworthy for such work. Log- 
ging roads, used only in winter with sleds, present 
frequent temptations to one who wanders around 
the country seeking beauties of nature, and with 
a buckboard one can often drive for miles into the 
apparently impenetrable forests. 

I was perfectly familiar with this old abandoned 
road, knew where its worst places were, could 
crowd my buckboard into the brush and avoid bad 
holes. For the most part it was a good trotting- 
road, and as it would save a considerable distance 
to my tired horses and myself I took it. You will 
understand that I drove straight on into it, for the 
new road turned short away on the left. 

The forest arched over the entrance. I went on 
at an easy trot for half a mile, then drew out sharp to 
the right to avoid a bad hole, formerly mended with 
logs, and now presenting the ends of those logs 
to catch and twist and smash a wheel. Then I 
plunged the horses' breasts into the low brush on 
the left of the road, and thus avoided the end 



174 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

of a great tree-trunk which had fallen and lay half- 
way across the old track, on the right-hand side. 
The twilight outside the wood was almost darkness 
here, but both horses and driver knew the road, 
and we went on at a fast trot for thirty rods, when 
I heard a piercing scream, followed by a succes- 
sion of intermingled screams and shouting. It all 
came from behind me. I pulled up and listened 
an instant ; then turned the horses into the low 
bushes, jumped out, and lifted the hind axle of the 
buckboard to the right while the horses swung 
around to the left, and drove back. 

In the gloom I found some people who had come 
to grief. They were a man and a woman, who had 
been driving one horse before a buckboard. They 
had plunged into the hole and broken one wheel, 
then pulling instantly on the off rein had wrecked a 
fore-wheel on the log, and were thrown unhurt into 
the bushes. Their horse was an old logger, accus- 
tomed to catastrophes, and had stopped for orders. 

There was nothing to do for these people except 
to give them a lift. Their buckboard was left where 
it stood. Mine was single, but the woman sat by me 
on the seat, and the man sat on the back end of the 
board leading his horse. For the uninitiated it may 
be well to explain briefly that a buckboard is a 
wagon whose seat stands on a broad spring-board 
which extends from axle to axle. The structure 
is simple, the riding on rough roads is very much 



EXAMPLE 175 

easier than that of any vehicle on steel springs, and 
if properly built of good stuff it will carry a very 
heavy load. I drove slowly now. The moon, the 
harvest-moon, two days or so after the full, had risen, 
but moonlight makes a wood road more difficult to 
drive than darkness. It creates shapes and shad- 
ows wholly unfamiliar. It makes dark-looking holes 
across the road with the shadows of bushes or tree- 
trunks. 

You have probably been wondering what these 
people were doing in that wild wood road. I had 
been puzzling myself with the same question, but 
had not asked it ; in fact, little had been said — 
nothing that was not absolutely necessary. For 
when I found them their first words to me had been 
somewhat short and gruff, and I had neither thought 
nor opportunity of measuring them. I had been 
smoking a cigar when the screams arrested me. It 
was still between my teeth as they loaded into my 
buckboard, and I threw it away as I took my seat. 

The world is made up of all sorts of people. It 
wouldn't be the world it is but for this fact. As in 
physical nature the wisdom of the great Direc- 
tor has provided compensations and balances, low 
grades of animals to devour filth and be food for 
other grades, thus forever rounding the circle of 
life, so it may be that He has intended some kinds 
of men and women to fill places in the moral world 
in which they have their uses, though we cannot 



176 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

discover what those uses are. What these people 
whom I had picked up in the woods were made for, 
what purpose they serve in the economy of moral 
nature, I don't know, unless they were made as irri- 
tants, mustard-plasters, blisters. Certainly we need 
that class of people sometimes. They were of a 
queer sort. As I took my seat and started the 
horses, the woman spoke. Naturally one might 
have expected something in the way of thanks. 
Nothing of the sort was there. She spoke in a semi- 
patronizing, semi-didactic way, expressing her sor- 
row not unmingled with offence at my being one of 
the sinners who use tobacco. 

She gave me a lecture on smoking and drinking, 
which I received in humility. It was plain that she 
supposed me to be a resident of the country in which 
she was on a " mission. " She talked glibly, and her 
companion occasionally suggested approval from 
the axle behind us. There was no convenient place 
into which I could dump them again, without hurt- 
ing them, strong as was the temptation to do it. 
They did not seem to belong to any society or any- 
body, but were adrift, living on the country through 
which they drifted. The amount of false history, 
false translation, false quotation, false doctrine, and 
trash which this woman gave me, as an unlettered 
rustic, while I from time to time made a suggestion 
by way of ignorant inquiry, and so started her on 
afresh, was positively astounding. 



EXAMPLE 177 

I dropped them gracefully at the first house, and 
never heard what became of them. But as I lit a 
fresh cigar and the horses resumed their usual 
speed, I pondered on a part of the lecture I had 
heard. 

It appeared that these people did not know their 
road, and having heard me say whither I was going, 
followed me, relying on me as a guide. Thus my 
example, in taking the wood road instead of the 
public road, had led them to disaster. " You are 
responsible for your example," is a common gener- 
alization, and the anti-tobacco woman reiterated the 
phrase. It is a favorite phrase with many enthusi- 
astic advocates of total abstinence and many preach- 
ers of " reforms." 

There are few doctrines more thoughtlessly and 
carelessly taught, even by men of intelligence, than 
this doctrine of responsibility for example. By this 
dogma life is walled in to the narrowest limits, 
loaded down with the heaviest burdens of responsi- 
bility for the sins of others. Life is no such diffi- 
cult labor. When I drove that road I was under no 
obligation to inquire or to think whether any other 
person was going to put on me the responsibility of 
showing him the road. I deny absolutely any and 
every charge that I, by my example, led that party 
to a smash-up. Life would not be worth living if in 
all that we do and do rightfully and rightly we are 
to be held responsible for others who, following our 



178 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

examples, undertake to do the same things and do 
them wrongfully and wrongly. The strong swim- 
mer is not chargeable with the death of the man who, 
seeing how easily he swims and thinking to do it as 
well, plunges in and is drowned. The tight-rope 
walker is not responsible for the broken neck of the 
fool who follows his example. The skilled hunter 
is not to be accused of the death by wild beasts of 
the unskilled man who emulates his deeds. The 
cool man of iron nerve who climbs precipices, walks 
on dizzy edges, leaps over deep chasms, has nothing 
to do as guide of the weak brain and legs which 
follow him to their destruction. In each of these, 
and in a thousand like cases, it is essential to re- 
sponsibility that the follower who has gone to grief 
establish on his part a claim on the leader he fol- 
lowed, a right to take his example and guidance, 
and that he then follow the example exactly. 

The path of duty in this world is a narrow path, 
and sometimes a very difficult path. But it ought 
not to be made painfully laborious. If the upright 
man, doing that which is right, following as closely 
as he can the example of his Master, who was once 
man among men, is to be told that his right-doing 
becomes wrong-doing because others may misinter- 
pret it, that his praying may be a sin because others 
may think he is praying to idols, that his teaching 
of truth may be a sin because others may follow his 
example and teach error, that his pure affections 



EXAMPLE 179 

may be sins because others may plead his example 
for their impure affections, that his temperance may 
be a sin because others may imitate him in eating 
and drinking,but do them intemperately — if, in short, 
the doctrine is true that man is responsible not only 
that his life and conversation be right, but also that 
his right-doing shall not be used by others to justify 
their wrong-doing, then duty is too complex for our 
humanity. 

Grant that we are responsible for example in ill- 
doing, ill -living. That we are responsible when 
others follow us in right-doing and go beyond us 
into wrong ways is untrue. There is no difficulty 
in drawing the line. But the subject is muddled 
by careless teaching, and so muddled that people of 
vagrant habits and minds, like those I picked up in 
the woods, distribute damning error in connection 
with it. The woman said in substance that she 
could teach Christ himself to set a better example 
in a land of wine-bibbers. 



XVIII 

THE SIGN OF THE CROSS 

The minister was a Presbyterian and a low-church- 
man. He was a very low churchman. The dif- 
ference between a churchman and a very low 
churchman is that the latter has little respect for 
the special considerations which make his church a 
church. There are churchmen and low-churchmen in 
all churches. The day of the old high-church Pres- 
byterians is mostly gone by, except in the Scotch 
churches. The book of government of the church 
is pretty much forgotten, very much avoided, most- 
ly unknown to the laity, and when discovered by 
some inquisitive layman is often explained away. 
It is very high-church. The low-church Presbyte- 
rian minister, earnest, sincere, a hard-working and 
devout man, had warm affiliations with all the clergy 
in the town and neighborhood, excepting one. He 
" exchanged " with them, giving his own people to 
understand that there was nothing in Presbyterian- 
ism which made it worth their while or his while to 
maintain it as a superior organization. He did not 
preach this doctrine, but he practised it. Once in 



THE SIGN OF THE CROSS 181 

a while he rejoiced the hearts of the old deacons 
and elders by a rousing sermon, in which he set be- 
fore the congregation the distinctive features of the 
grand old church sanctified by the blood of the 
martyrs of Scotland, in whose faith hosts had gone 
from the toils and the moils of this world to the 
rest and the immaculate robes of the other. In 
such sermons he struck hard blows at Baptists and 
Methodists, sounding blows aimed at doctrines; 
and harder blows at Episcopalians, mostly aimed at 
practices ; for he was a learned theologian, and he 
knew that the Thirty-nine Articles were Calvinistic 
enough to burn holocausts of Servetuses. Like 
thousands of the clergy of all denominations when 
they preach denominational sermons, he made the 
fearful error of teaching "how these people differ 
from us," instead of teaching the grand truth of the 
ages, how marvellous is the identity of most denom- 
inations in the essential doctrines of Christianity. 

Whatever he was in theology, he was a faithful 
pastor of his own people, and untiring in seeking out 
the poor, the distressed, the neglected, the sinning. 
You may think you know hard-working men. I tell 
you there are clergymen of various denominations 
all over the world whose daily and nightly unceas- 
ing labors surpass all you ever imagined of hard 
work, and with constant surroundings of distress, 
misery, anguish. This clergyman lived a life of 
such labor. 



182 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

There was an Episcopal church in the large manu- 
facturing town, founded with express reference to 
certain families of English working-men. A rector 
who was called a high-churchman had been over it 
for some years. No one knew exactly what " high- 
church " meant, but most people had a tolerably 
correct idea when they said, with much indignation, 
"he thinks his church a great deal better than 
ours." Probably that was what he thought. That 
is what every Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, 
Lutheran, ought to think and teach of his own 
church. If he does not he has no business in his 
church. Other people thought him a high-church- 
man because the worship of God in his church was 
very ornate. There was no denying it. He had 
candles on the communion-table, which he called 
the altar; and he wore a stole with crosses em- 
broidered on it ; and he emphasized the is when 
he read " this is my body," uttering the words very 
slowly. There is no end to the things they said 
this high-church ritualist did, even to praying for 
the dead. But the most serious charge made 
against him, in the mouths of Christians of various 
names, was that when he gave the benediction he 
held out two fingers and made over the heads of his 
kneeling congregation the sign of the cross. I 
don't think there was anything in those days which 
many good people were so afraid of as the sign of 
the cross. Precisely what injury they feared was 



THE SIGN OF THE CROSS 183 

not definable, but no one ever feared the evil eye in 
the days of witchcraft with more sincere apprehen- 
sion. Nor would this sketch be complete without 
the statement that the Presbyterian minister, while 
not foolishly afraid of it, did regard the use of this 
sign as a superstitious abomination, and talked and 
taught and preached as he thought about it. 

Thus much as to what " they said " about the 
rector. Now as to what he was. No two men 
were ever more alike in spirit and life than the 
minister and the rector. The latter was a man of 
deep study, much learning, devout piety, complete 
self-abnegation, and devotion to the work of his 
ministry. He had been married, but his wife and 
two children had died — not gone away — for he had 
never considered his family broken up, had never 
stopped saying " give us our daily bread," precisely 
as when they knelt with him. This man was im- 
bued with love for his Master and love for his 
fellow-man. His whole life was given to the work. 
He was day and night among the people, with 
those who were in trouble, with criminals in prison, 
and criminals who had come to him with confes- 
sions of sin and penitence, with the sick, the dead, 
the desolate. His ritualism, as it was called, was 
in his opinion useful in the work of his Master, 
and the crowded little church, the full Sunday- 
school, the working character of his young people 
in their little societies, the constant accessions 



184 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

to his parish — these attested some wisdom in his 
views. It began to be said that the poor peo- 
ple of this small church did as much charitable 
and reforming work as the richest congregation in 
the town. 

It is not to be denied that there was some weak- 
ness, some foolishness in his ritualistic practices. 
No man is perfect in judgment. But his mistakes 
did no harm. Nothing that he did was aggressive. 
Ritualism has never been aggressive. It is always 
inside of churches, generally waging a defensive 
war against attacks of outside foes, and not often 
getting much sympathy from bishops. Withal this 
good man had, from long habit of study and lone- 
some devotion to his work, gotten the idea in his 
mind that other denominations of Christians were 
poor workers in the field of the world, other so- 
called churches very doubtful gates by which to en- 
ter the kingdom of heaven. He had adopted that 
very stupid custom of some churchmen, of trying 
to defy the law of language in America, and insist 
that it was wrong to use the word " church " ex- 
cept when speaking of his church. The preface of 
his own prayer-book, the statutes of his State, the 
literature of his age, the common-sense and com- 
mon practice of the people which settles words — all 
were against him. But he lived in a world of his 
own, and rarely thought of any other — a common 
error, which injures many a good man's influence. 



THE SIGN OF THE CROSS 185 

I have taken so much space in describing 
these two men that I have little left for my 
story. 

There was small-pox in the town one winter, and 
wide-spread terror. Those are times when the peo- 
ple who are fond of abusing churches and clergy 
fly to them for aid. It is a queer characteristic of 
men who despise religion that they want the church 
near them when they or their dear ones are dying, 
and especially desire religious services at their 
burials. And it may be added that such men seem 
then to think the church an institution specially 
created for all men, though they never attended its 
services or paid towards its support. Now they 
ask its services gratuitously, accept them without 
thanks, and without repayment by any offering to 
church or minister. 

The rector and the minister were everywhere 
among the poor victims of the pestilence. They had 
never met. One night the minister was told by the 
doctor that a poor Scotch woman, whom he had 
missed from her usual seat in the gallery of his 
church, was dying. He went through the snow- 
storm, wading in drifts and battling the wind, to a 
little lonesome wooden house on the outskirts of 
the town. It was midnight and after. No one 
answered his knock. He opened the unlocked 
door, entered a room, and saw, by a dim candle- 
light, a woman's form lying on a miserable pallet, 



1 86 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

and the rector kneeling by it, praying aloud for the 
soul that had just gone. 

" Is she gone?" he said as the voice ceased, and 
he saw the rector make with his finger on the fore- 
head, foul with disease, the sign of salvation. 

" She is at perfect rest." 

11 Do you say that ?" 

" Yes, I have seen her often, before she became 
delirious. She was full of faith." 

" You have been here often ? and I have not ! 
She was one of my people, not yours. I never 
knew she was ill." 

"Yes, I know it. It was by accident I heard of 
her, and perhaps I ought to have sent you word ; 
but I have been very busy. She was a simple, 
good soul. She loved the Master. He loved her. 
No pestilence comes where she is now !" 

It was thus these two met. And it happened 
within the week that a very similar occurrence took 
place, this time the rector finding the minister with 
a dying girl, one of the children of the Episcopal 
Sunday-school. That day they walked away to- 
gether, and fell into a conversation about baptism 
and regeneration, and each found that the other 
had thorough knowledge of what the Fathers and 
more modern theologians had said about it, and 
that they were not far apart in their own opinions. 
For they understood a fundamental rule that when 
men settle the meaning of common words in the 



THE SIGN OF THE CROSS 187 

language, they find that much apparent theological 
disagreement ceases. 

They had thought themselves very far apart, and 
they found themselves very close together. When 
love lights the pages of controversial theology, it is 
astonishing how divergences vanish. There was 
not a bit of rancor, nothing but love in the hearts 
and lives of these two honest servants of the same 
Master. They parted that night, each surprised 
and very thoughtful ; each convinced that between 
the Episcopalian baptismal " regeneration " and 
the Presbyterian baptismal "ingrafting into Christ " 
there was no difference which could be made clear 
to the poor mother of the dying child. 

They met often after this, and each learned more. 
The minister discovered that in all human worship 
there is, of course, more or less ritualism, since 
" worship in spirit " means worship in person and 
purse, and men bend their knees in bodily ritualism 
when they desire to bow their souls in the humility 
of prayer. The rector learned that ritualism was 
good only when and so far as it would do good in 
the work he had at heart, and that the idea of sub- 
stituting color symbolisms of church device for 
the settled color symbolisms of Europe, America, 
or China, -was a vain imagination of churchmen un- 
educated in the various symbolic languages of the 
world. 

I think the point on which they talked most was 



188 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

the subject of Hoty Orders. The Presbyterian 
learned to think more than ever of his church's 
teachings that his own ordination was in unbroken 
succession from the Apostles, through the laying 
on of the hands of the Presbytery. The Episco- 
palian began to consider, as he never had before, 
the fact that in his church a bishop, or a dozen 
bishops, cannot ordain a priest without the same 
laying on of the hands of the Presbytery. Time 
would fail me to enumerate the points of dogma 
or doctrine on which, in their now constant inter- 
course, they talked, opening their souls to one an- 
other. 

Then grew up between these two men a mutual 
admiration and affection, which became warmer 
from year to year. They were men of God. In 
their humanity were weaknesses, imperfections, 
which their intercourse helped to show them. One 
in their faith, one in their purposes of life, in their 
object in work, in their devotion to one divine 
Master and His work in the world, they found in- 
finite joy in helping each the other. Neither of 
them ever thought that his church was less fitted 
for the great work than the other. Each loved 
his own church the more, and while the rector be- 
came more wise in his ritual, the minister became 
more of a high -church Presbyterian. While the 
rector wanted to introduce incense, but never did, 
the minister allowed his young people to intro- 



THE SIGN OF THE CROSS 1S9 

duce, what is the same thing, odorous flowers to 
accompany and ornament worship. 

Time passed on, and those two men loved one 
another to the end. The rector went first. His 
life of labor wore him out at last. Besides, there 
were voices always calling him, and that almost 
always hastens the day of going. Too ill to stand 
or walk, he w r as carried to his native village in the 
up-country — to gain strength, said the doctor ; to 
die, said the w r orn laboring man. Thither a few 
weeks later he summoned his closest friend, the 
Presbyterian minister, and for two days they held 
holy communion. 

In the afternoon, just before sunset of the sec- 
ond day, there was a sharp, sudden change in the 
sick man. The minister had promised him, and 
now T to fulfil his promise knelt by his side, opened 
the ready prayer-book, and began the words : " Oh, 
Almighty God, with whom do live the spirits of 
just men made perfect after they are delivered 
from their earthly prisons " — and there a choking 
sob interrupted his tremulous voice. For an in- 
stant he closed his eyes. Opening them he saw 
the face of his friend as the face of the first mar- 
tyr, as the face of an angel, and knew that he was 
dead. And then the Presbyterian voice rose clear 
as he went on with the prayer : " We humbly com- 
mend the soul of this Thy servant, our dear broth- 
er, into Thy hands as into the hands of a faithful 



190 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

Creator and most merciful Saviour. Wash it, we 
pray Thee, in the blood of that immaculate Lamb 
that was slain " — and so on till he finished the 
prayer. Though I know nothing about it, I have 
no doubt he prayed with and for his brother ever 
after, till they two met again and began together 
prayers that will be offered as long as souls exist 
and need anything from God. 

The day his friend arrived the rector had said, 
" Will you read the prayer in the visitation service 
when I am dying ; and will you read the committal 
in our burial-service when you bury me ?" and the 
minister had said, " I will." So on a sunny after- 
noon, when all the people of all the country around 
were gathered in the village graveyard, the minis- 
ter with clear voice said the words "earth to earth, 
ashes to ashes, dust to dust," sprinkling the mould 
on the coffin with his own hand. 

Heaven was open overhead that afternoon. 
The angels saw the burial. The happy ones in 
paradise saw it all. The joyous soul, that had 
gone from the clay which was in the coffin down 
there in the open grave, saw on the coffin the 
dust his brother's hand had sprinkled in the form 
of the cross of the Lord, whom those two men 
had served as well as they could. 



XIX 
a child's voice 

We don't know half the time who are our fellow- 
travellers in this journey of life. I rode some hun- 
dred miles, and not happening to look into another 
car on the train did not see its occupants. When 
we reached the station, while some passengers were 
transferred to trains going on in one and another 
direction, and some were rushing for carriages and 
'busses to hotels, I collided with a lady, apologized 
for the accident, looked just an instant at her face, 
and did not see her again. Riding up in the omni- 
bus, I was conscious of a queer muddle of thoughts, 
caused by a glance at that face, in the crowd at 
the station. I had seen the face of a living, act- 
ive, wide - awake person, but I had in mind the 
well-remembered countenance of one I knew was 
long dead. 

When we were comfortably settled, and had 
washed off the accumulated dirt of various States, 
through which we had been dragged in what we 
moderns regard as the perfect style of luxurious 
travel, I sat on the piazza of the hotel looking at 



I 9 2 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

the mountains with no small delight. But I could 
not expel that face from my mind. As twilight 
came on there came with a click — a snap — a sud- 
den flash-light on memory, which you have doubt- 
less often experienced, the explanation, a very sim- 
ple one, of my muddle. This face was probably 
that of a daughter grown to close resemblance of 
her mother who lived long ago. 

It is very certain that the modern theories which 
ascribe memory to the arrangement of particles of 
the brain are based on insufficient observation of 
that mental action which is called memory. When 
asked if you remember an occurrence, and you re- 
ply " Yes," it may not and does not strike you what 
an innumerable variety of facts impressed on your 
mind are at once recalled to view. The occurrence 
is one fact, but the surroundings are hundreds, which 
go to make up the memory. Do you remember a 
face, seen long ago? You do, but what a compli- 
cated picture is that which, suddenly entering into 
your mental view, leads you to say "Yes, I re- 
member it." The when, the where, a room, its 
furniture, its light, dress, ornaments, countless sur- 
roundings, external and internal, mental, moral cir- 
cumstances, all go to make this instantaneous pict- 
ure. If each of the almost infinitesimal particles 
of the brain received a photographic picture, with 
added colors, it would scarcely be sufficient to con- 
vey all the distinct thoughts and facts which come 



A CHILD S VOICE 193 

in the lightning-flash of a memory of one face, one 
landscape, one event. 

But let us leave the mystery of memory to the va- 
garies of biology, while we rejoice in it as a posses- 
sion which will be ours when the particles of our 
brains have ceased to ache with physical labors. 

Into the soft twilight came the picture of a coun- 
try church in a northern winter's day. All the 
landscape around it was white, except where an 
occasional pine-tree lifted its dark foliage. There 
were not many pine-trees left. For it was a part of 
the country long cleared and settled, and rich farms 
stretched over the rolling land in all directions from 
the village. But there were three great pines, grand 
wide-spreading white-pines, which stood in the grave- 
yard close to the church. The sounds of the wind 
through them were many toned. In summer, when 
the windows were open and the breezes were gen- 
tle, the voices were musical ; in winter, when the 
north winds raged, they were thunderous and ma- 
jestic. 

It was a splendid winter day, with a brilliant sun- 
shine, and a stiff breeze drifting the snow in sheets 
and mists of gold and iridescent light. Within the 
old church were none of the comforts and luxuries 
of modern churches. The interior was plain ; a 
gallery ran across one end ; the pulpit was at the 
other end, high up, a round pulpit with a round 
sounding-board hung above it. It was reached by 
13 



194 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

a winding stairway on one side. On either side of 
the pulpit was a high window, covered with green 
blinds, one of which was partly raised to let in light 
on the minister's sermon desk. Through that win- 
dow you could see the dark branches of one of the 
great pines, waving solemnly, swaying slowly to and 
fro i and constantly, through the darkness among 
the branches, went sheets 1 of sparkling light as the 
snow flew by on the wind. 

Some of the pews were of a kind which few mod- 
ern Americans have seen. These were the pews in 
the middle part of the church, in front of the pulpit, 
and were family pews, square, with seats running all 
around them. They were shut off from other pews, 
not alone by the high partitions, but also by silk 
curtains, a foot or so deep, hanging from bars above 
the partition rails. Thus the occupants of the pew 
were invisible to all other persons on the floor of 
the church. The pulpit was so high that the minis- 
ter could see those who were facing him, and occu- 
pants of the end gallery could see those who sat 
with their backs to the pulpit. Those pews, I have 
said, were family pews, and they were well filled. 
Somehow, in modern times, it would seem that fam- 
ily pews are not much needed. Perhaps families 
are not so large. Perhaps the custom of going to 
church all together is not so rigidly observed. It 
was a sight to see a father and mother with six, 
eight, or more children, and perhaps some servants, 



A CHILD'S VOICE 195 

file into one of those pews, and file out of it when 
the service was over. 

The precentor was missing. He had never been 
missing before. Sudden sickness, an upset into a 
snow-drift and a smashed-up cutter, or some other 
unforeseen cause, had kept him away. There were 
plenty of men and women, any one of whom could 
have supplied his place if accustomed to stand up 
and sing in front of gazing people. But even in a 
country congregation, where everybody knew every- 
body else, that embarrassment which keeps so many 
good speakers and good singers unknown made it 
difficult to supply the place of the absent precentor. 

Eider James Douglas was growing to be an old 
man. He was nearly eighty, but neither his bodily 
nor his mental strength seemed in any way abated. 
He was a man of courage, as his early life, in per- 
ilous times, had amply testified. Nor in his later 
years had any one imagined that he could be af- 
fected with timidity by the presence of man, woman, 
or devil. It nevertheless gave him a certain shock, 
the like of which he had never experienced, when 
the minister gave out the hymn and no precentor 
appeared in front of the pulpit. The elder sat in 
a pew at the foot of the pulpit stair. From the re- 
motest times within the memory of the people he 
had taken the minister's place when the latter was 
absent. He knew that all looked to him to supply 
any existing need. But it had never before hap- 



196 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

pened to him to lead in singing. The tunes in 
which he had joined with clear and correct voice 
for fourscore years were as familiar to him as the 
words of the oldest hymns. But every one who has 
tried it knows that for public speaking or public 
singing one must have a certain something back of 
knowledge of words or tunes. 

The tall form of the old man, as he rose in the 
elder's pew and stepped out to the pulpit front, was 
the embodiment of courage, but there was no cour- 
age there. Still he started well, and the people, 
not knowing how weak was the leadership, joined 
heartily. The volume of praise was so full and 
strong that by the time they had reached the end 
of the first stanza the elder had begun to think he 
had discovered his vocation, and went boldly at the 
second stanza with full voice. 

There is an old French proverb which teaches 
that it is only the first step which is difficult. Like 
many other proverbs it is a falsehood, sometimes 
costly, as many a man knows who has tried to walk 
a narrow plank across a river or a chasm. The el- 
der made the common mistake of those who find 
themselves in unaccustomed paths, after boldly es- 
saying the first steps. He looked ahead. 

If you find yourself unexpectedly on your feet 
making a speech, and you begin to feel shaky, don't 
think ahead, don't look forward ; just confine your- 
self to the work in hand, the sentence you are enun- 



A CHILD S VOICE 



197 



dating, and give no thought to what is to follow 
until you come to the end of what you are saying — 
in short, speak in public as you always speak in 
private conversation. 

The elder began thinking whether he could carry 
the tune successfully over the notes in the next 
line, and, thinking, began to weaken as he sang. 
The voice which had been firm escaped his con- 
trol, and only an uncertain sound murmured from 
his lips. Did you ever watch the process of the 
breaking down of a congregation of people who 
are apparently singing bravely together when the 
leader's voice falters ? One and another voice fol- 
low him for a note or two ; here one stops, there 
another, then a dozen, and a total collapse ensues. 
Thus it was now. All the people saw that James 
Douglas was scared, and the silence into which 
they fell was mingled with inquiring wonderment. 

Whatever they thought was but for one instant. 
They were not singing, the elder was not singing, 
and yet through and above the strange rushing, 
throbbing sound of the wind in the pine branches 
there was another sound. Where did it come from ? 
Was it a miracle ? No one had ever heard such a 
sound in that church. The hymn was singing itself, 
in a child's voice, clear, sweet, the same tune, not 
loud, on the contrary quite low. The minister stood 
up in the pulpit and looked down into the pews. 
Elder Douglas swept his gray eyes from floor to 



1 



igS AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

gallery and gallery to floor. No one could tell 
where the sound came from, except only John Rob- 
son, who sat solitary in the front seat of the end 
gallery with twinkling eyes fixed on the minister's 
pew. 

A child's voice, singing, is always melodious. To 
those who heard it then this voice was wonderfully 
sweet as it sang the words : 

"Other refuge have I none; 
Hangs my helpless soul on Thee : 
Leave, ah, leave me not alone." 

The lost courage of the elder had now come back. 
He was not the man to think any sound supernat- 
ural which reached his physical sense of hearing. 
Others in describing the incident used to say that 
they did think for a while there was something un- 
canny about it. Not so the elder. He had been 
scared when he found himself trying what he had 
never before tried, the leadership of a singing con- 
gregation, and facing the awful idea that he might 
break down. Now the child's voice restored his 
confidence and faith in himself. His full, rich old 
voice joined the tiny treble, and then all the peo- 
ple came in together, so that the church was filled 
with their voices — 

"Still support and comfort me!" 

and they finished the stanza in a fine burst of 
sonor 



A CHILD S VOICE 199 

Then came a trying moment. The elder and the 
people, and the minister too, as all afterwards con- 
fessed when they talked it over, having finished the 
stanza successfully, w r ere one and all affected by 
similar thoughts. What had happened ? What was 
that voice ? Will I be able to lead this next stanza ? 
Will the elder lead on ? Will the voice be heard 
again ? 

Elder Douglas had no intention of pausing, but 
he did pause involuntarily, while he was wondering 
whether the child would again sing. A great gust 
of wind swept around the end of the church, and 
one of the long branches of the pine dashed its 
soft needles across the window-panes, and a deep 
sigh swelled into a sobbing voice, all in one in- 
stant ; and then the little voice, all alone, was 
heard " Thou, O Christ — " It must be some child, 
said every one to himself or herself, and everybody, 
old and young, sang " — art all I want," and so the 
hymn went on to the end. 

After the service the people talked, and asked 
one another who it was or what it was, but as no 
one could give any explanation they separated, 
with considerably more for Sunday -evening dis- 
cussion than usual. But John Robson knew all 
about it, as he walked to the parsonage behind the 
minister and his granddaughter, who, with her 
mother, had come up for a winter visit. The 
mother was ill. The child had gone to church with 



200 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

the minister, and had been put alone into the 
great square pew, where she sat with her back to 
the pulpit and her feet on her grandmother's foot- 
stove, which John had placed for her before morn- 
ing service began. John thought the front seat in 
the pew the proper one for children. So it was, 
according to custom, when older persons were pres- 
ent. John was always fond of telling the story, 
how he sat in the gallery and saw the eight-year- 
old child, shut out of sight in the great pew, sing- 
ing her hymn right on, unconscious whether others 
were singing or not. 

Where is the child now ? Who can tell which 
way any one has travelled among the countless 
ways which led hither and thither from the door 
of that old church, ways in the world and ways out 
of the world ? Was it her face, grown now to be 
like the face of her mother, which I saw in the 
crowd at the station ? 



XX 

PURITAN SUNDAY 

Do you know what that old and worn phrase, 
11 A golden winter morning," means ? If you have 
never seen it in our extreme northern country, of 
course you do not. It is not a poetic description, 
but plain English, describing the light. For the 
light makes the morning, and is the morning. Over 
all the country, far and near, rises from the snow a 
mist, invisible in the twilight and equally invisible 
after the sun is three hours high. When the sun 
comes above the horizon this mist is lit into yellow 
gold-dust. Around trees and other dark-colored 
objects there is a halo. Mountain-peaks seem to 
radiate light, and house-tops nearer to you blaze 
with lustre. If there has been a recent still fall of 
snow which has rested on branches of trees and 
leaves of evergreens, and this begins to drift light- 
ly in the early day, it is more distinctly like gold- 
dust in the air. For nothing is white in this light, 
but everything partakes of the yellow tint, and the 
fields are covered with cloth-of-gold. 



202 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

Yesterday morning was one of these golden 
mornings. And it was Sunday morning. And 
that made it more golden. For to you and me, my 
friend, who possess that priceless treasure of hu- 
manity, the love of Sunday, there is always an at- 
mosphere on such a morning such as one may 
think they will enjoy who pass the gates of pearl. 
In summer or winter, in city or in country, Sunday 
morning brings to us great calm and peace. 

They greatly mistake who imagine that in the 
minds and memories of all children who were 
brought up in the old-fashioned Puritan ways of 
" keeping " Sunday there is any pain or dislike to 
the day, produced by the rigidness with which we 
were made to keep it. You may find now and 
then one who likes to talk of the bigotry of that 
day in his childhood, but in the main it is not the 
Puritan children who when they grow old abuse 
the Puritan Sunday. With all its rigidness it was 
nevertheless a day apart from all other days, and it 
entered into the soul of the boy or the girl as an- 
other life, in another country, among other people, 
wholly other than the life of the six days. Perhaps 
in early manhood, in the whirl of active life and 
the absence of desire for mental rest, some may 
contemn the bonds of the old Sunday. But its 
memories are more deeply and more tenderly cher- 
ished by those children, now grown to be old men 
and women, than any memories of the other days. 



PURITAN SUNDAY 203 

One day in seven the boy lived more or less in 
company not of this world. He thought it hard 
sometimes, often. He had small love for the he- 
roes of old Bible history, and a little more, but not 
very much, for Great-heart and Christian and the 
worthies of the allegory, wherein he read the story, 
but did not attempt to master the allegorical mean- 
ing. 

But to-day, after fifty years in the work of the 
world, I challenge him, whoever he be, to answer 
you what part of his young life and young reading 
is most precious to him — what, if he must forget, 
would he desire now to retain longest? He will 
tell you that his memories of old Sundays at home, 
of Sunday mornings and Sunday evenings, of the 
church and its people, of family scenes, and books 
read with brothers and sisters and friends on Sun- 
days are his most constant, most enduring, and 
most beloved subjects of memory. 

I do not take any stock in the common saying of 
this day that the Puritan Sunday was injurious to 
the character of children, because they so gladly 
escaped from its bonds into freedom that they 
went to the other extreme. I believe if you could 
poll the honest vote to-day of the sons and daugh- 
ters of old Presbyterian, Episcopalian, Congregation- 
al, and other families, in which they kept Sundays 
in the most rigid Puritan style, and who are now 
keeping it in the free-and-easy style of our time, 



204 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

they would be wellnigh unanimous in saying that 
they would prefer to have their children taught to 
keep Sunday as they used to keep it, rather than 
brought up as now, practically without any sever- 
ance between the life of the first day and the life of 
the other six. 

Not love Sunday because one was made to ob- 
serve it too rigidly in youth ! Don't believe it. No 
one that wasn't so brought up has a tenth part of 
an idea what it is to love it. What if it was hard 
on us ? What if we do remember the longings we 
often had to be out of the bonds, the wish we often 
uttered that it were Monday morning ! Now we 
know and feel that one day in seven, one month in 
seven, one year in every seven, we were out of this 
world, and in another world. For that is what 
Sunday then was. A world in which there is rest 
is another world than this in which we work. And 
whether we liked it or not, it made us know the re- 
ality that there is another world, just as plainly as 
if every Saturday night we had been sent to Asia, 
and made to pass one-seventh of our time there 
until we grew up and could go and spend our time 
where we pleased. 

If a boy had been thus physically sent to spend 
a day in each week in some strange country, he 
would all his life remember most vividly what 
he saw there, and the people he met there, and 
this may be the reason why memories of old Sun- 



PURITAN SUNDAY 205 

davs are more distinct as a rule than of other 
days. 

How clearly the boy — for though he has lived to 
threescore and ten he is a boy still — how clearly 
he remembers the winter Sunday mornings, the 
ride to church, a sober sort of ride compared with 
that moonlight straw-ride on Friday night — with 
four horses and a jolly load in the sleigh — but a 
pleasant ride withal. He says nothing to the old 
folks as they turn the corner by the big chestnut- 
tree about what happened there. His mother re- 
marks that the snow looks trampled as if a drove of 
cattle had been in the drift. He does not explain 
that as they went flying around that corner eighteen 
young people were hurled promiscuously into that 
drift, and the horses went tearing down the road 
with the upset sleigh, leaving robes and blankets 
all along the road till they brought up in the church- 
shed. No one is to know that fact, and it did not 
leak out till midsummer — too late to be a stopper 
on various other rides. 

At the church door — he remembers now — there 
was some whispering with boys about that small 
affair. But in the church the thoughts of Fri- 
day night vanished, and the old man would not 
have remembered it at all but that he recalls that 
Sunday-morning ride and every little incident of it. 
For the old people he saw gathered there are now 
all gone, all now in that other country where they 



206 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

do not work and weary. They are to him now as 
people whom one has seen in distant travel, in 
peculiar costume, in a strange country. 

Sunday dress is a feature in memory. People so 
dressed are wholly other than the same people in 
week-day dress. For why — they are indeed now of 
another race. That old brown coat, with its thick, 
high collar up to the very scalp of the head, is a 
queer, quaint old thing to remember, if you think of 
the coat only ; but when you see it, the collar half 
hidden by the flowing white locks of the old man, 
who put it on every Sunday morning for fifty years 
as the ceremonial garment wherein he came into 
the presence of his Lord to worship Him, then it 
shines as bright as the embroidered chasuble of an 
Ambrose or a Gregory. That black poke-bonnet 
and black woollen shawl and black merino dress 
have no aesthetic characteristics whereby to com- 
mend themselves to recollection or by reason of 
which one should specially recall the thin, pale face 
of the old maiden sister of the farmer, whom you 
might have seen on Saturday in other dress doing 
her dairy work as she had done it close on to three- 
quarters of a century. But worn as they were only 
on Sundays, and only when she came to sit with 
her of Bethany at the feet of the Master, the black 
bonnet of the dear old woman is in memory bright 
with starry lights, and her shawl and dress are 
pure and shining as the white robes they of Sardis 



PURITAN SUNDAY 207 

wear, walking now with Him where it is always a 
golden Sunday. 

My pen has wandered away from what I began 
to write. The memories of the group in the church 
on the old-fashioned Puritan Sunday morning 
crowd in'on me. They are gone into the country 
wherein they lived much of their lives here, espe- 
cially the one-seventh of their lives called Sundays 
— the country wherein they tried on that day to 
make us learn to live also. Perhaps they did not 
succeed in bringing into this lower world the exact 
atmosphere of that to which they have since gone. 
But they impressed on our souls the ineffaceable 
truth that there is, parallel with this life, another 
wherein the patriarchs and prophets, the apostles 
and martyrs, the saints of many ages, the beautiful, 
the beloved, the holy women and stainless children 
are living while we are living here. When we re- 
member them, the teachers of our youth, especially 
when we remember them on a Sunday morning in 
church or a Sunday evening by the fireside, we 
have no doubt at all that they are now in the pleas- 
ant country of their old hope and faith, with that 
admirable company whose lives they taught us to 
study on Sundays and imitate on week-days. 

They were, many of them, very poor and very 
hard-working people. The ten-hour working-man 
of the city leads a life of ease compared with those 
up-country farming families. Before daybreak be- 



208 AMONG THE NORTHERN HILLS 

gan and after dark ended each day's toil and labor 
of man and woman, and children so soon as they 
were old enough to work. And the reward was 
scanty — a bare subsistence, yielded by the hard soil 
which gave them nothing willingly, only graves 
when the work at last was over. No class of la- 
borers on earth work so hard, and therefore need 
and enjoy the Sunday rest so much, as the farming 
population of our country. 

And they loved the day, just as they kept it, or 
tried to keep it, in close conversation with another 
and better country. They loved the church and 
the service. There were stern and solemn counte- 
nances set on the face of the minister then. There 
were faces of exceeding human loveliness in the 
congregation. I wonder sometimes whether they 
get together now, whether in the time surely to 
come we shall all, or many of us, get together and 
send ringing out over the eternal hills the songs we 
sang here of a Sunday morning in the old church. 

They will need no translation into that country's 
language. For that at least we learned in the Puri- 
tan Sunday, the language of the other world, and 
we can't forget it. It clings like mother-tongue, 
and it is the language of the mother of us all. So 
that if, perchance, where she now is, that dear old 
woman, whose lot here was poverty, and sometimes 
positive want, shall meet Martha or Mary, Elizabeth 
of Hungary or Brigitta or Lucia or Catharine, she 



PURITAN SUNDAY 20g 

will have no trouble in talking with them. Nor, if 
the Uishop of Ephesus should chance to walk by 
and speak with them, would he fail to understand 
her when she said in his own and her own language, 
tk We do not hunger, neither thirst any more." 

Yes, they talk one language there — a language 
you and I heard, if we did not learn, used, if we 
did not understand, in those old Sunday evenings ; 
and depend upon it, however much we have forgot- 
ten the lessons of those days, there remains much 
of the good they did in others. And to-day the 
most powerful element for good in our country, the 
most conservative principle in the rush of social 
and political life around us, is that which yet re- 
mains to us of the old-fashioned Puritan Sunday. 



THE END 



By WILLIAM C. PRIM1: 



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